The man in the iron mask

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

The Man
in the
Iron Mask

BY

Tighe Hopkins

AUTHOR OF

"The Silent Gate: A Voyage into Prison,"
"An Idler in Old France," "The Dungeons of Old Paris,
"Lady Bonnie's Experiment,"
etc.

ILLUSTRATED

LONDON

HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED

13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET
1901

All rights reserved

PROLOGUE.

"" Tell me, I pray thee, thy name," cried Jacob,
wrestling with the dark adversary at Peniel. So
have successive generations of writers striven with
that plaguy ghost of history, the Man in the
Iron Mask, and have vainly entreated his name.
But it has at last been spoken. The mask has
dropped from him, behind which he lurked, it seemed,
impregnably.

The solution of this diplomatic mystery of two
centuries, the u ultimate dim Thule " of so many
speculations, brings forward no new appellant. It
disposes finally of a host of pretenders (whose claims,
however, were for the most part quite abandoned in
the nineteenth century), but it seeks the tragic honours
of the mask for no fresh candidate. This may be
a disappointment to some, for what is most fabulous
in this history has at least been richest in dramatic
surprises ; but to others, and especially to those
who have followed the progress of research in
France, and who are not unacquainted with the
earliest true surmises on the subject, it will be
rather gratifying to discover in the victim of Louis
XIV.'s vengeance that Mattioli who was first put
forward a hundred and thirty years ago — whose
pretensions to the mask have been canvassed, de-

viii PROLOGUE.

bated, approved, assailed, rejected, renewed, and are
now reduced to demonstration.

History has allowed a long innings to guess-
work, tradition, and invention in all that has con-
cerned the Man in the Iron Mask. But the truth
is that she has been ready to come into her own,
to yield up the secret of the Mask, almost any
time since the opening of the century. The right
kind of research, and the dogged patience which
nothing but Q. E. D. will satisfy : so much she
asked in payment. The unlocking of Archives has
left few problems of history unresolved ; and when,
after the Revolution, those curious documents were
disclosed which Louis, his ministers, his ambassadors,
and his gaolers had penned in full security, it was
certain that the true tale of the Masked Man must
some day get the benefit of print. Louis XIV.
had his revenge of Mattioli. History has had hers
of Louis XIV. I cannot think that the story misses
much in human interest by the elimination of the
large element of fable ; but the fact remains that
to a reader of old French history it presents no
extraordinary feature. The mask itself excepted
(and the unimportant character of that too celebrated
disguise is hereafter shown), the fate of Mattioli
was neither exceptional nor uncommon. It accorded,
if not entirely with French jurisprudence, at all events
with the administration of French justice. It was
of a piece with the system under which political
and other offenders always might be, and usually
were, dealt with : arbitrary arrest, arbitrary im-
prisonment, and arbitrary punishment, with or with-

PROLOGUE. ix

out the form of trial by a court, packed as Richelieu
generally packed his, to ensure conviction. Trial
and sentence were both dispensed with in Mattioli's
case ; but in the days of the " bon plaisir royal et
ministeriel," which were long before and long after
the days of Richelieu, those formalities were easily
forgone. So lightly were subjects of all degrees
imprisoned under the monarchy, and so readily for-
gotten in prison, that when a prisoner died after
years of captivity, the very Minister by whose order
he had been confined, and who had been informed
of his demise, would often request to be told the
reason of his detention. The close of the nineteenth
century has shown us that justice in France can
still be a thing of very small security to a prisoner
at the bar ; and the epoch under consideration in
this volume begins in the last quarter of the seven-
teenth century. That a needy and obscure Italian
diplomat and adventurer, having tricked, flouted, and
infuriated a sovereign of the temper of Louis XIV.,
should end his days in the Bastille, is not a matter
to excite even the most trifling degree of wonder.
Still, the documents to be offered to the reader
present, with some new lights, a remarkable picture
of more than one phase of imprisonment under
the old regime ; and in Saint-Mars we have the
typical State gaoler of the age, incorruptibly faithful
to his charge, inflexible almost to cruelty, callous
to the sufferings of his prisoners, and in his
private aspect a miser growing richer and richer at
the expense both of the prisoners and of the
public treasury.

x PROLOGUE.

The credit of the identification of Mattioli with
the Mask belongs, as one thinks it should belong, to
France. The beginnings of what constitute history
on this subject — history more or less exact at the
outset — are set forth in the Introduction, and more
minutely in the second part of the volume. Delort,
whose Histoire de V Homme au Masque de Fer is
seventy-five years old, was the first to publish a
really useful collection of documents. Elsewhere I
have explained how, owing to the incompleteness of
the series he had access to, his system came to
grief. Forty-five years later appeared Marius Topin's
L Homme au Masque de Fer, which is still as a
whole the best and most complete narrative extant
But even Topin left something undone ; and his
proof is not absolute. His is the merit, nevertheless,
of having first spread the light upon the whole field
of enquiry ; and he it was who brought the case for
Mattioli triumphantly to the front again, when the
one signal error of Delort and his contemporaries
seemed to have left it for ever in uncertainty. Had
the investigation ceased with Topin, an impartial critic
of his work might well have decided that unless and
until this hypothesis were completely overset, Mattioli
should be received as the Man in the Iron Mask.
The crowning proof, decisive and irrefutable, might be
to seek ; but testimony and inference alike fastened
the mask upon Mattioli. This hypothesis has not
been overset. It has been carried further, and con-
firmed. The solution of M. Frantz Funck-Brentano,
ratified by the .common assent of scholars in France,
has satisfied every doubt. Scarcely glancing at the

PROLOGUE. xi

history of the affair, summarising all in a few pages
of irresistible and translucent argument, he has laid
the great enigma bare.*

There is a Legend of the Iron Mask, and there
is a History of the Iron Mask. Of the Legend,
only a small portion (and that, perhaps, the most
ridiculous), is known to the generation of to-day :
with the History, the detail of it, this generation is
almost of necessity unfamiliar, since no volume has
yet embraced the whole. Legend and History are
here brought together and contrasted. The best
and the most foolish stand side by side ; the incredible
transmutations of the Legend, and the precise facts
of the true and rather simple History. A certain
political transaction, not of the highest importance,
nor of the most unusual kind, took place two hundred
years ago in France. Out of this transaction has
arisen the most extraordinary fable of modern times.
But truth has done her tardy office ; and the moral,
somewhat worn, speaks for itself.

*I refer to the chapter, " L' Homme au Masque de Fer," in
M. Funck-Brentano's Ltgendes et Archives de la Bastille, Paris :
Hachette et Cie., 1898. Second edition 1899. Crowned by the French
Academy. An excellent translation from the pen of Mr. George
Maidment has since been published by Messrs. Downey and Co.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE.
Introduction. — The Sphinx of French History 3

PART I.— THE MAN IN THE MOON.
CHAPTER I.

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS.
Points worth Remembering — Sources of the Legend — "A Con-
tribution to the History of Persia " — A " Persian " Romance
of the Court of Louis XIV. — Louise de la Valliere — The
Count of Vermandois — The anonymous Romance examined —
Vermandois at the Siege of Courtrai — His Sickness and in-
contestable Death — Burial at Arras — Vermandois not the Man
in the Iron Mask . . . 27

CHAPTER II.

THE ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN.
Branches of this System — Developments under the First Empire
—Baron de Gleichen — Louis XIV. "a mere bastard" — A
Discovery missed by Dumas — Voltaire and the Elder Brother
— This Version perishes with the Revolution — Queen and
Cardinal — Absurdities of Voltaire's Story — Soulavie and the
Twin — Soulavie's Supporters — Choice of Dates ... 48

CHAPTER III.

THE INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM.
Buckingham at the Court of Louis XIII. — Paris amazed at his
Prodigality — A Retinue of six or seven hundred Persons —
Buckingham falls in love with Anne of Austria — Anne never
alone with him — Amiens — Buckingham's declaration — Amiens
again — The Scene in the Queen's chamber — Anne sees Buck-
ingham for the last time — Marie de Medici's statement to
Louis XIII. — Not a vestige of Proof . . . . . 71

CHAPTER IV.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN.
Early days of Anne of Austria and Louis XIII. — The Girl's en-
thusiasm and the Boy's indifference— The Marriage — "almost
a question of State " — Richelieu and the young Queen — Illness
of Louis XIII. in 1630 — Reconciliation — Birth of Louis XIV.
— Ceremony and precautions at the birth of a Child of France
— What of the Twin ? — Soulavie's story examined in Detail —
Louvois's visit to the Mask disproved — The Silver Dish and
the Linen Shirt — History repeats that "the Iron Mask was
not a son of Anne of Austria " . . . . . .86

CONTENTS. xiii

CHAPTER V.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH.
Character of Monmouth — His conduct at Sedgemoor — In the
presence of James II. — The System which makes Monmouth
the Man in the Iron Mask— Extraordinary character of Saint-
Foix's "proofs" — From the Cafe Procope to the boudoir
of the Duchess of Portsmouth — Execution and Burial of
Monmouth . . . 114

CHAPTER VI.

"the king of the markets."

The systcme Beaufort is the especial snare of age — Lenglet-
Dufresnoy, Lagrange -Chancel, and Anquetil — Beaufort and
Monmouth — Beaufort a Lumpkin at Court but a Leader in
the Field — The market people dub him their King — Beau-
fort appointed Admiral — His change of front — Lenglet-Dufres-
noy's theory — The siege of Candia — Panic and rout of the
French — Beaufort missing — The Dates — Was the Man in the
Mask a Nonogenarian ? 139

CHAPTER VII.

THE TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET.
Bibliophile Jacob makes Fouquet the Masked Man — An earlier

XXX

conjecture— "64, 389,ooo Ke ^ adiou "— The author of this jest

unknown — The fable revived by Lacroix — Louis XIV. re-
solves upon the overthrow of Fouquet — His arrest at Nantes
in 1 66 1 — A special Court formed to try him — A " Seventeenth
Century Warren Hastings affair" — The Judges in favour of
banishment — Louis's decree of perpetual imprisonment — Sup-
position on which Lacroix's hypothesis rests — Fouquet in the
dungeon of Pignerol — Gradual improvement in his lot — His
wife and family allowed to visit and stay with him — Fouquet's'
death of apoplexy, March 23rd, 1680 — Impossibility of agree-
ing with Lacroix — Theories of Ravaisson, Loiseleur, and lung
— "Oblivion has looked upon them all " . . . .158

PART II.— THE MAN IN THE MASK.
CHAPTER I.

THE INTRIGUE FOR CASALE.
Italian policy of Richelieu— Gradually abandoned by Louis
XIV.— The " Military diplomacy " of Louvois— Character
and situation of Charles IV. , Duke of Mantua— Casale— Louis
covets this Stronghold — Intrigue begun in 1676 — Abbe
d'Estrades— Ercole Antonio Mattioli— D'Estrades employs
Giuliani to sound Mattioli 181

xiv CONTENTS.

CHAPTER II.

THE RIPENING PLOT.
The Situation — D'Estrades to Louis XIV. — Mattioli selected to
conduct the affair — He wins the Duke of Mantua's consent to
the sale of Casale — The Duke ambitious of a military com-
mand under Louis — Mattioli to Louis — Louis to Mattioli —
Louis to send an army into Italy — 100,000 crowns to be paid
for Casale — Louis's conditions — Everything agreed to —
Charles in a hurry to conclude the affair — Midnight conference
between Charles and d'Estrades — Mattioli to go to Paris . 192

CHAPTER III.

THE TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLI.
Delays are now upon the French side — Mattioli 's journey post-
poned — D'Estrades precedes him to France — Mattioli ill —
Off at last — The Treaty — Mattioli has audience of Louis —
Preparations on the Frontier — Louis to Charles of Mantua —
The French impatient while the Italians begin to lag — Alarms
— D'Asfeld seized by the Governor of Milan — Mattioli sus-
pected — D'Estrades to Mattioli — Mattioli betrays the plot . 206

CHAPTER IV.

THE VENGEANCE OF " THE MOST GENEROUS " KING.
Details of Mattioli's treason — His motives ? — Rage at the Court
of France — How shall Mattioli be dealt with ? — Louis
sanctions the proposal of d'Estrades — The King's Orders —
The Abbe's ruse — The rendezvous — Mattioli falls into the
trap — Is made prisoner by Catinat — Search for the papers —
The King is avenged — Mattioli given out as dead — His family 227

CHAPTER V.

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL.
Pignerol in the 17th century — Saint-Mars : the gaoler quintessen-
tialised — His manner of guarding his prisoners — Mattioli
becomes the " Sieur Lestang " — Is to be treated "with
severity" — Temporarily insane — The mad Jacobin — The Ring
— Fifteen years in Pignerol ....... 250

CHAPTER VI.

THE INQUISITION OF JULES LOISELEUR.
The first attempts to prove that Mattioli was the Man in the
Mask — Delort — His omissions — Mattioli's fellow-prisoners at
Pignerol — Saint-Mars receives the command of Exiles — The
question is, What prisoners went with him ? Who was the
prisoner who died of dropsy ? — Sudden disappearance of
Mattioli's name from the correspondence of Louvois and
Saint-Mars — Deductions of Loiseleur 270

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MISSING LINK REVEALED BY TOPIN.
The history of the Mask not contained in any single set of
documents — Topin takes up the trail — Reasons why Saint-
Mars should have been afraid to take Mattioli to Casale —
Was Mattioli at Exiles or not ? — The Missing Link — Mattioli
was never at Exiles — He re-appears accordingly in the history. 285

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE.
The Isles of Sainte-Marguerite — Arrival there of Saint-Mars in
1687 — Mattioli still in Pignerol — Saint-Mars at his ease — The
mandate of February 26th, 1694 — Reasons for the transfer of
the three prisoners from Pignerol — Louis XIV. falling on his
evil days — The mysterious journey — After the death of
Fouquet and the release of Lauzun, Mattioli was the only
"prisoner of consequence" at Pignerol — New measures of
precaution — Mattioli, " your ancient prisoner " . . . 296

CHAPTER IX.

THE SILVER DISH.
A Prisoner of State under the Monarchy — Mattioli and other
State Prisoners — Fable does duty for History — Origins of the
legends of the Silver Dish and the Linen Shirt — The Guitar —
Fact and fable in the history of the Iron Mask . . .312

CHAPTER X.

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE.
Saint-Mars is transferred from Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille
— He is to bring with him his "ancient prisoner" — From the
Isles to Paris— The halt at Palteau — Letter of the grand-
nephew of Saint-Mars — The entry in Du Junca's Journal —
The Mask is a mystery, and remains a mystery, to the staff of
the Bastille — But in the course of time his importance ceases
— He is displaced in the Bastille by a fortune teller — Effect of
this upon the Legend — Origin of the story of the whitewashed
cell — Death and burial of the Mask — His name ; his age —
"Marchioly," " Marthioli," Mattioli 323

CHAPTER XL

Q. E. D.
The mask itself unimportant in the History — But the mask gives
rise to the Legend— Mattioli the Man in the Mask ? — The
proof set out — The Five Prisoners — Louis XV. and Louis XVI.
— Madame Campan — Charles of Mantua in Paris . . . 350

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Buckingham, and his

The Man in the Iron Mask, according to the Popular

Legend Frontispiece

Louis XIV. at the Age of Twenty-eight

Louis, Comte de Vermandois .

Louise de la Valliere, as a Carmelite Nun

Voltaire ....

Anne of Austria

George Villiers, first Duke of
Assassination .

Anne of Austria and her Sons

Louis XIII.

Cardinal Richelieu .

Cardinal Mazarin

Charles II.

The Duke of Monmouth .

James II.

The Execution of Monmouth on Tower Hill

Francis de Vendome

Nicolas Fouquet

Louis XIV. .

Plan of the Town and Citadel at Pignerol to face page

Plan of the Dungeon of the Citadel at Pignerol

to face page

Louvois 231

Plan of the Chateau of Exiles . . to face page 250

Panorama of Pignerol (Pinerolo) at the present day .

Plan of the Fort of Sainte-Marguerite to face page

The Fort and Chateau of Exiles in 1681 .

A Corner of the Fort of Exiles ....

Isle and Portress of Sainte-Marguerite at the present
day

Bird's-eye View of the Bastille, 16th and 17th centuries

Entry in the Register of the Bastille ....

Entry in the Register of Saint Paul's

Burial Certificate of the Masked Prisoner .

3 1
37

44

53
62

75
81

89

100

107

117

123

129

J 35
147
166

185
216

228

2 59
264
279

287

2 93
325
333
345
359

The f^an in the Iron, fy^ask

INTRODUCTION.

INTRODUCTION.

An arrival at the Bastille, September,

1698, has been the cause of more

French discussion than any other event in

the notable history of that fortress.

It was Thursday, 18th of the month, and

three of the afternoon. Armed men on

horseback surrounded a closed litter, from

which, when all was sure, descended a meagre,

silent figure, Saint-Mars, Louis XIV.'s most

trusted gaoler. He had come to the Bastille

for the first time, having just received its

command. The entry of a new governor

would naturally be of no small moment to

the staff, whose future lay between his hands ;

but curiosity was immediately transferred from

Saint-Mars to the prisoner who accompanied

1*

4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

him. The prisoner's face was hidden by a
mask of black velvet, a disguise in which no
one had ever before been brought to the
Bastille. The unhappy man was already a
mystery, before even he had set foot within
the prison which was to be the third and
last of his long captivity. No one knew
him, who he was or what he had done
that Saint-Mars should have him in this ex-
traordinary keeping. Together, Gaoler and
Mask, they had traversed France from far
Provence, travelling always in this secure
fashion, by silent ways. At the chateau
and domain of Palteau, a property of Saint-
Mars, a halt had been made ; and the
peasants of the estate who came out to meet
their lord preserved and passed on as a
tradition the memory of that strange visit.
The mask, once seen, seems to have haunted
the dullest fancy. In itself it was no way
remarkable ; a little black velvet mask : what

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 5

affected the mind was the circumstance that
the person who wore it was a prisoner.
This was something entirely unwonted.
The peasants observed that when the table
was served the prisoner was always kept with
his back to the window, they noted the pistols
at the hand of the vigilant Saint-Mars, and
the two beds ranged together in the sleeping-
room.

The officers of the Bastille had been
apprised, and the King's lieutenant, Du Junca,
whose careful diary will be opened, had
prepared for the prisoner " the third room of
the Bertaudiere tower."

Five years later, after one day's illness,
November 19, 1703, this prisoner died in the
Bastille. His end was so rapid that he did
not receive the solace of the sacrament ; the
chaplain " exhorted him a moment before he
died." As dusk fell on the next afternoon the
drawbridge was lowered, and a sorry funeral

6 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

passed out, which took its way to the graveyard
of the church of St. Paul : behind a rude coffin,
two turnkeys of the prison. A furtive, per-
functory burying, scarcely even decent ; into
his hasty grave, probably by lantern-light, the
turnkeys unknown lowered the unknown dead,
and that was the end. On the church's
register was inscribed the name of Marchioly.
In the Bastille they had known him as the
prisoner from Provence.

This is that mysterious creature, the problem
of whose identity has bewitched, impassioned,
and embroiled six generations of enquirers.
The incontestable facts are these: that in 1698
Saint-Mars conducted to the Bastille a prisoner
who died there five years later ; that he was
known in the Bastille as the prisoner from
Provence ; that his unique, unhappy memory
survived his death in the prison, and overran
the world. These are the simplest data of the
problem that lies before us. Twenty-four years

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 7

(1679 — 1703) in the obscurity of prison; at
the end of that period, an obscure, untended
death-bed, and a hurried and obscure inter-
ment ; some further years of oblivion, and then
there arises and steals from that graveyard
of St. Paul this ghost that shrouds its face,
intent upon an odd revenge, the torment and
insoluble conundrum of historian, fabulist,
novelist, dramatist, essayist and gossip — the
Sphinx of French history : the Man in the
Iron Mask.

The sole question to resolve is : Whose
was the face which the mask concealed ?

The happy acumen of Topin instructs him at
once as to the false path on which his predeces-
sors, with scarcely an exception, had set forth.
Voltaire had said : " What is doubly astonishing
is this, that when the prisoner in question was
sent to the Isles of Sainte- Marguerite, there
did not disappear from Europe any personage
of note" The Mask had lain fifteen years

8 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

in the dungeon of Pignerol before they trans-
ferred him to Sainte-Marguerite, but Voltaire,
than whom never a writer has approached this
theme with so complete a lack of information,
did not take that fact into account. The
statement just brought forward stimulated
and obsessed all minds. Who of note did
vanish from European scenes between the
date of Mazarin's death (1661) and 1703 ?
That must be the way to seek the truth
about the Iron Mask ! Thus was begun the
" monstrous brood" of all those theories and
systems which have darkened counsel on this
subject. In pieces of sundry sorts, waiting
to be sifted and joined together ; in official
despatches, epistles, reports, memoranda ; in
certain live pages of the Bastille's archives, the
true history of the Masked Man was lying
all this while unheeded, unthought of. The
hunt was elsewhere — anywhere, everywhere
but where the quarry couched. They were

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 9

all wanting to come upon the track of that
11 person of importance " who must have
been thrust out of sight while Louis XIV.
was on the throne ! Was it a brother of
Louis ? Was it Vermandois ? Was it
Monmouth ? Was it Beaufort ? Was it
Fouquet ? The least resemblance found or
imagined, the mask was clapped on, and a
new discovery given to the world. " Never
an Indian deity," says Paul de Saint- Victor,
" has undergone so many metempsychoses,
so many avatars." To one incarnation of the
Mask succeeds another and another ; system
topples upon system ; but the Sphinx keeps
hold on the secret. During thirty years
(says Topin) Voltaire, Freron, Saint-Foix,
Lagrange-Chancel and Pere Griffet were
cutting and slashing one another most
brilliantly, in a joust in which each adversary
found it easier to demolish the opinions
opposed to him than to maintain and win

io THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

acceptance for his own. In Topin's day
fifty-two writers, sharing among them twenty-
five different hypotheses, had essayed to look
behind the mask, and Vicomte Maurice
Boutry extends the list to sixty, not embracing
the legion of anonymous contributors to
periodicals and dictionaries.* Would the
problem ever be expounded ? This intermin-
able series of defeats — system and system
built up in years and shattered in an hour —
ended by producing one curious but not
unnatural result. Since no one could identify
the Mask, might it not be that the Mask
had never lived ? Here was perhaps some
prodigious myth, and nothing more. Critics
less sceptical, but despairing of the truth,
averred the question beyond human ken.

* In how many works on the Bastille there is mention of the Man
in the Iron Mask, I cannot pretend to say. The library of the
British Museum contains 40,000 treatises on this famous dungeon of
pre-Revolutionary Paris. Thus, reading at the impossible rate of
one a day, it would take alx>ve a hundred years to exhaust the
collection.

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY, n

" The history of the Iron Mask," says
Michelet, " will probably remain for all time
in obscurity." And Henri Martin : " History
is debarred from giving judgment on what
will never pass beyond the confines of con-
jecture."

But the curiosity of the world has never
been appeased. Irritated, checked, baffled,
and a hundred times defeated, it has come
again to the quest. The itch spread far ;
England, Germany, and Italy helped France
to confuse the issue, to draw the mask a little
tighter over those inscrutable features.

A secret well kept during many years is
greatly liable to distortion when it begins at
last to emerge from the comfortable dark of
legend and tradition. Indeed, it may become
twenty or more dissimilar histories before it
has been properly divulged. At one era and
another the secret of the Iron Mask has been
five-and-twenty secrets at the very least. In

12 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the lifetime of Louis XIV. it was preserved with
a cunning and fastness scarcely to be believed.
Was ever gaoler so mum as Saint-Mars ?
That mute, uneasy shadow, perpetually plagued
by fears for the safety of his prisoners, now
with an eye at the key-hole and now crouched
among the branches of a tree to spy unseen,
never in four-and-twenty years gave up the
secret which he held inviolable by order of
the King. In the fifteen years the prisoner
was captive at Pignerol, in the four years
he lay at the Isles, in the five that brought
his tragedy to a term in the Bastille, no sub-
ordinate officer of either place had learned so
much as his name. From Du Junca's journal
we shall see presently that even the King's
lieutenant got it by mere hazard after the
prisoner's death. And the Court was not
better informed than the Bastille. The
omniscient Saint-Simon, the Greville of France,
had never an inkling of the matter. That

THF SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 13

unbridled gossip, the Princess Palatine, who
spent half the day at her desk inditing scandal
to her family and friends abroad, was com-
pletely wide of the mark.* Supposed at one
time to rank among the prerogatives of the
crown, history has proved that this was not
the case with the sombre secret of the mask.
Madame Campan will show us that it was
unknown to Louis XVI. Napoleon expressed
a lively regret at not being able to satisfy
his curiosity. Louis-Philippe discussed the
problem frequently, but confessed his ignorance
of the solution ; and if certain other sovereigns
pretended to the knowledge, the contradictions
of their statements sanction the inference that
they were not more correctly instructed. f

* "I have just learned," writes Madame from Versailles, October
22, 171 1, who was the masked man who died in the Bastille. His
wearing a mask was not due to cruelty. He was an English lord whc
had been mixed up in the affair of the Duke of Berwick (natural son
of James II.) against King William. He died there so that the King
might never know what became of him."

t Topin.

t 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Here, then, indeed was a Secret of the State
consummately preserved, not only during, but
after, the lifetime of the monarch whose inte-
rest it was to safeguard it. " See that no one
knows what becomes of this man" * Such was
the private peremptory order of Louis XIV.
to his minister, Abbe d'Estrades ; and he was
obeyed. Clearly, therefore, this would be a
hard secret to come at, until the sole right
method — the search for, and disentombing
of, the documents — was chanced upon.

But both the writers on this mystery and
their readers, in England as in France, have
displayed, for the most part, a rather singular
perversity. It would be fastidious, if not
altogether idle, at this day to make inquest on
the motives which led so many authors of
erudition, ingenuity, and exceeding patience to
beguile the public with the notion that they
had found beneath the mask the features

* " II faudra que personne tie sfac/ie ce que cet homme sera devenu."
Louis XIV. to d'Estrades : April 28th, 1679.

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 15

of Vermandois, or Monmouth, or Beaufort, or
the Armenian patriarch Avedick — nay, even
of Moliere himself! Assuredly the scandal-
hunters were not for nothing in this affair,
and no doubt some private vengeances were
served by certain theories which offered not
the veriest semblance of reality.* In some
other instances, when mere malignity has not
motived the enquiry, the prepossessions of
authors with fixed ideas have lured them far,
and left them, in the end, the victims of
irreducible dilemmas. A conjecture is reared
into a system ; such facts as favour it are
adopted as readily as the facts in opposition
are rejected. When the list of famous men
comprised within the historical period is ex-
hausted, the period is audaciously extended ;

* Thus, there were those who pretended to discover under the
mask a son of the Duchess Henrietta of Orleans and Louis XIV. ;
a son of Henrietta of Orleans and the Comte de Guiche ; a son of
Christine of Sweden and Monaldeschi ; a son of Marie-Therese
(wife of Louis XIV. ) and the negro servitor whom she had brought
from Spain ; a son of Cromwell, etc.

1 6 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

and a complacent public has been asked to
accept some effigy of an Iron Mask alive in
1706, three years after the attested death of
the prisoner of Saint-Mars. Avedick, the
Armenian patriarch, whose claims to the mask
were advocated by the Chevalier de Taules,
was not carried off until 1706. M. Emile
Burgaud fixed on General Vivien Labbe de
Bulonde ; but " M. Geoffroy de Grandmaison
published in the Univers of January 9, 1895,
two receipts signed by General de Bulonde,
one in 1699, when the Masked Man was in
rigorous isolation in the Bastille ; the other
in 1705, when he had been two years dead."*
It would seem, indeed, that scarcely an
author has come quite single-minded to this
task. There need be no general implication
of bad faith ; it is sufficient to suggest that
the majority of these defenders of systems
not defensible were anxious first to get their

# Funck-Brentano.

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 17

literary profit out of a topic of perennial in-
terest, and unwilling afterwards to admit the
truth that must undo them. It is not, how-
ever, in this way that things are proved, this
is not the way of science ; and perhaps no sub-
ject perplexing to history has remained longer
in doubt from the common disregard of the
just historical method.

But the offence in chief, the mischief of
the fable which has run throughout the world
to the hurt of a woman and a queen, should
be attached. It attaches immediately to
Voltaire. Here, indeed, we must conclude,
was malice prepense. First he prepares his
audience by an attractive hint or two ; retires
then, and watches the effect. Nothing could
be better ; we are all agog : as much more of
this as you please. So, without the least em-
barrassment on the author's part, the horrid
hoax is launched, and starts forthwith upon
its travels. It was a piece of quite un-

1 8 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

scrupulous sensationalism, skilfully imagined,
but — as there will be occasion to show —
elaborated with little art, and with less than
no regard for consistency. None the less,
there were in it all the elements of an abiding
popularity ; it had the romantic quality, it was
royally scandalous, it disclosed a seeming
State secret of capital significance, it soiled
the honour of a queen : for a hundred and
fifty years it has represented to the many the
whole entrancing truth of the Man in the
Iron Mask. But the proofs ? Ah ! there,
indeed, we are speedily confounded. M. Vol-
taire apparently forgot that history, sooner or
later, would be wanting to know what he
meant by it — this titillating fable of her
Majesty's amours and the semi-royal child
resulting from them, who was to end his days
as the prisoner of the mask. On Voltaire's
part not an ounce of real proof was ever
offered, and the researches of scholars have

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 19

clearly demonstrated that none ever could
have been offered, since none was ever in
existence. Of all the systems of the mask
this one is the most denuded of testimony.
The utmost rigour of investigation has failed
to shew that Anne of Austria had any part in
the affair of the Iron Mask ; on the other
hand, it has shewn conclusively that she had
none. At the time it was begun the queen
had been dead nearly twelve years. Let it be
added that this baseless hypothesis has "long
been abandoned. ■ The last writers who ad-
hered to it date from the revolutionary
period." *

But the public partiality for Voltaire's egre-
gious version is perhaps not wonderful. A
king's brother in the mask — it was really a
very fine notion ! The accessories, too, were

* Funck-Brentano. — In fiction, the system which is an extension
of Voltaire's has enjoyed, of course, the prepotent championship of
Dumas, in the novel beloved of Louis Stevenson, The Vicomte de
Bragelonne.

2o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

all so captivating to the fancy. If that damn-
ing resemblance to Louis XIV. existed (a pity
Voltaire could not contrive to prove it ! ), the
necessity for the mask is patent ; and pray let
it be, not the "light Venetian mask" of velvet
which in reality it was, and which was of uni-
versal use among the upper classes in Italy,
but the right melodramatic article, the " iron
mask " with the steel chinpiece, a mediaeval
instrument of torture, which could not have
been borne for a week ; and let the poor High-
ness wear this day and night for four-and-twenty
years.* This was something like romance!

Nor was this all. Who parts willingly with
the other adjuncts which time has grouped

* I have never seen the old-fashioned play on the subject of i the
Mask, which, no longer known to London, is still faring up and down
the country ; a version possibly of the once-admired piece, Le Masque
de fer, by Fournier and Arnould, first given at the Paris Odeon in
1 83 1. But, cycling through Canterbury in the falling light of an
October afternoon, I observed the placid thoroughfares of that city
aflame with pictures of the drama. Here was the Man in the Iron
Mask with a vengeance. The mask itself as depicted on the posters
had the appearance of a small boiler.

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 21

about the indomitable legend ? — the " bound-
less deference" shown to the prisoner, Saint-
Mars never seating himself in his presence,
addressing him " with bared head," serving
him with his own hands on silver plate, and
supplying him with "the most luxurious
raiment his fancy could desire " ; the notable
tale of the silver dish which the prisoner
flings out of window, after carving a message
on it with a knife, and which nearly costs his
life to the fisherman who restores it ; or the
version of Pere Papon, in which a shirt of fine
linen, with a letter written on the inside, takes
the place of the dish : who yields up willingly
these lively figments, long as they have gone
by the board ?

It is enough to recall the reception, cool in
some quarters and in others hostile, which those
scholars met with who first untied the knot.
Few problems of history have held so many
vested interests, and no vested interests in a

22 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

problem of history have been more tenaciously
fought for. What innumerable pens, French
and alien, were mortgaged in this affair ! Baron
Heiss's affirmation, the first true note upon
the Mask in French, was received "with
indifference." *

Voltaire, an old man now and jealous high
priest of his own inspired myth, was moved to
peevishness. "Why," he cries, "they have
even given him an Italian name!" Heiss's
epistle was merely in the nature of a sugges-
tion, but at last the right word had been uttered.
The unravelling remained to do, however, and
for a long time it was a task not less thankless
than laborious : the true heir was no Prince of
the blood, and there was no investing him with
fine linen or feeding him on silver dishes.
Voltaire's pretender, "young, and with features
of rare nobility and beauty" (though.no one
ever saw them !) was still the fairy hero of the

*Vte. Maurice Boutry.

THE SPHINX OF FRENCH HISTORY. 23

multitude. Came Topin finally, and the fairy
prince got his coup de grace. Not talent and
not genius will ever again make a Canterbury
Tale of the Man in the Iron Mask. History
lighted her lamp at Topin's hands, and was
avenged. M. Funck-Brentano has shown con-
clusively that Topin was right, and has
furnished the proofs that were still to seek.
But will the facts uproot the fable ? In
historical circles in France, discussion on the
question of the Mask is at an end, but, for
the general public, there are, as M. Sardou
says, " The guides, the showmen to reckon
with — those faithful guardians of legends,
whose propaganda is more aggressive than
that of scholars."* And among ourselves the

* Victorien Sardou. — Preface to Funck-Brentano. M. Sardou adds :
"When you reflect that every day, at the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite,
the masked man's cell is exhibited to visitors by a good woman who
retails all the traditional fables about the luxurious life of the prisoner,
his lace, his plate, and the attentions shown him by Saint-Mars, you
will agree that a struggle with this daily discourse would be hopeless.
And you would not come off with a whole skin ! " — Ibid.

24 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Voltaire tractate is still occasionally reprinted ;
Dumas is very much alive ; and audiences at
country theatres are perennially regaled with
the spectacle of the suffering prince, his
head encased in an iron boiler.

Meanwhile, for those who will read it, the
true tale as revealed by history is not bereft
of interest or romance. The treason of the
rash Italian, who flouted Louis the Magnificent
in the face of Europe, and was so terribly
despoiled for the same, needed only its Dumas,
or our own dear Stevenson, to be borne to the
rim of the universe. In any event, it seems
good to speed the Man in the Moon, and admit
in his place the corporeal Man in the Mask.

PART I.

THE MAN IN THE MOON.

27

CHAPTER I.

It will be of profit to remember : —

The Death

of i. That the mysterious prisoner

Vennandols. wag nQ myth

2. That, while quite unknown, legend was
already busy with him before his death.

3. That the hypotheses of the 18th century
are without the support of history.

4. That since, from the era of the French
Revolution, access to the Archives became
possible, these hypotheses have been one by
one abandoned.

5. That the expression " iron mask " —
" masque de fer " — does not occur in any
official document : it is a " mask," a " velvet
mask," or a " black velvet mask."

6. That the tradition of a royal secret, passed
on from king to king, is disproved.

28 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

7. That the Legend owes everything to the
imagination of men of letters, that it is en-
tirely at variance with facts, and that it has
held its ground by reason mainly of the
prevailing voice of Voltaire, and the enduring
fascination of Dumas.

We can proceed now to determine the source
and origin of the Legend. In 1745 there
appeared at Amsterdam, under the auspices of
the Compagnie des libr aires assoctes, a small
romance entitled " A Contribution to the
History of Persia."* It was published anony-
mously, and the authorship has remained a
secret. Several critics have assigned it (" not
without some reason," says M. Funck-Bretano)
to Madame de Vieux-Maisons ; others to the
Due de Nivernais ; and others again to the
Chevalier de Ressegnier, an officer in the
Guards, whom Madame de Pompadour had
sent to the Bastille. General lung inclines to

* " Me" moires secrets pour servir h Phistoire de Perse."

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 29

Paul Lacroix's opinion that Voltaire himself
was the author. The identity of the author
is, however, quite unimportant. What is of
interest is, that this slender novel was very-
soon the talk of France. It said the first public
word about that hidden prisoner of Saint-Mars
whose misfortunes were just beginning to
entrain attention.

" Cka-Abas" * says the anonymous author,
" had a legitimate son, Sdphi-Mirza,\ and a
natural son, Giafer.% The children were
almost of an age, but their characters agreed
in nothing. Giafer was never tired of saying
that the French were greatly to be pitied for
their subjection to a monarch who had not
the wit to rule them. These treasonous
words were carried to Cha-Abas, but the
father was stronger in him than the king,
and he could not bring himself to exert his

* Louis xiv.

t Louis the Dauphin.

X Louis de Bourbon, Comte de Vermandois.

3o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

authority over a son who had abused his
tenderness. At last, Giafer so far forgot
himself as to strike Sephi-Mirza in the face.
This was at once reported to Cha-Abas,
who, trembling for the culprit, and willing
even now to overlook the offence, could not
but regard it as an attempt against himself
and his crown ; and, as the affair had scan-
dalised the court, he could no longer yield to
the promptings of a father's love. He con-
strained himself, and summoned the most
intimate of his courtiers ; showed them his
grief, and demanded their voice upon the
matter. For a crime of this magnitude, they
declared, the laws of the State awarded
death. What a verdict for the doting father !
Then, one of the ministers, more sen-
sible than the others of the affliction of
Cka-Abas, proffered a means of punishing
Giafer without putting him to death.
•' Let the prince,' said this counsellor, ' be

*mmmm

Louis XIV. at the age of Twenty-Eight.
From an engraving after Le Bran.

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 33

sent to the army which was then on the
frontiers of Feldran* Shortly after his arrival
let it be given out that he had sickened of
the plague, which would be a sure way of
detaching from him his friends and admirers,
and, a few days later, let it be announced
that the malady had carried him off. Then
whilst, in the presence of the whole army, his
obsequies should be celebrated in a manner
befitting his birth, he must be borne away
by night, and taken secretly to the citadel
of the Isle of Ormus! f This advice was
very generally approved, and above all by
the afflicted father. Persons faithful and
discreet were chosen for the conduct of the
affair ; and Giafer, with a splendid retinue,
set forth for the army. There it fell out
as the plot had ordered, and while all the
camp lamented that untimely fate, the unhappy

* Flanders.

t Isles of Sainte- Marguerite,

34 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

prince was hurried by privy ways to the
Isle of OrmuSy where they delivered him
into the hands of the governor, whom Cha-
Abas had commanded that no one should
ever obtain sight of his prisoner. One
attendant only, who shared the secret, was
taken with the prince ; but this man dying
by the way, the escort slashed his face with
their poniards that he might not be recog-
nised, and left him stripped and stark upon
the road. When Cha-Abas, to reward the
governor's fidelity, bestowed on him the
command of the citadel of Ispahan* Giafer
was removed there. At the Isle of Ormus,
as in the citadel of Ispahan, he was com-
pelled to wear a mask when, by reason of
sickness or for any other cause, it was
necessary to let him be seen." f

Such was the story which set all minds

* The Bastille.

t Mimoires secrets pour servir h Vhistoire de Perse-

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 35

in France to work upon the enigma of the
prisoner of Saint-Mars. " No sooner had it
appeared," says lung, " than the problem of
the mysterious prisoner became the question
of the day. Refutations, criticisms, pamphlets,
letters, memoirs, and ever new solutions
succeeded one another rapidly from 1750 to
1790." The " History of Persia" continued
to be credited even after Voltaire's more
romantic nonsense had seduced the multitude.
Let us examine its pretensions. It repre-
sents, as Topin observes, a kind of com- *
promise between the impossibility of accepting
the imaginary hero of Voltaire and the desire
to see in the Masked Man some person of
exalted birth.

In Vermandois we have at all events a live
man, and the natural son of a King to boot.
His mother was that beautiful and sympathetic
Louise de la Valliere who touches us more
closely than any other of the heroines of

3*

36 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the court of Louis XIV. Yielding with re-
luctance to the passion of the King, la Valliere
was no courtesan and no fortune-hunting ad-
venturess. Strong in her very weakness,
she subjugated without art or wile the most
imperious sovereign in Europe, and from the
torments of a love, ceaselessly combated, she
passed to the rigors of a penance courageously
endured for thirty years. Sweetest and most
captivating figure of the great reign, she has
engaged the hearts of posterity.*

The graces of the mother were innate in
Louis de Bourbon, Count of Vermandois.
Tall and finely formed, he possessed la Val-
liere's instinctive gift of pleasing. Kindly and
generous, he had his own peculiar ways of
conferring favours, arid the most fastidious
of men, it was said, could never reject or be
offended by his benefits. From a child he
had the love of Louis XIV., who was as proud

* Topin.

JL>i ( tt ( otwlra 1/ le iS. o , i {*'&'}. v

lllillll illlllll

Louis, Comte de Vermandois.
From an engraving after Mignard.

THE DEATH OE VERMANDOIS. 39

as he was tender of him. In the army, he
won the officers as completely as he had won
the common soldiers, and his personal courage
was of the highest ; with the troops in
Flanders, on one occasion, he concealed a grave
malady, that he might not miss his part in
an attack. As if under the influence of that
subtle warning which often strikes those whose
death is to be premature, he seemed eager to
ensure for his memory the renown of some
signal act : but his day was too short for glory.
A posthumous celebrity of a most uncommon
kind was, however, in store for him. Sixty
years after his death, it occurred — Heaven
knows how ! — to the unknown author of these
Memoires secrets pour servir a Fhistoire de
Perse to add to the too-brief life of the gra-
cious Vermandois twenty years of captivity in
prison, and to render his destiny sadder by
presenting him as the incognizable victim of
Louis XIV.'s tyranny.

4 o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

What proofs, or failing proofs, what proba-
bilities does the story carry ? In the
seventh volume of Mdlle. de Montpensier's
interminable " Memoirs " there is a definite
statement that Vermandois was under a cloud
at court when he set out for the siege of
Courtrai ; that the King, annoyed about his
gallantries in the town, and the company the
young man kept, had banished him from the
presence. There is no word of a quarrel
with the Dauphin, or of a blow in the face,
a scandal which could scarcely have re-
mained unknown to Mdlle. de Montpensier,
and one which, since she was no friend to the
brilliant Vermandois,* she would not have
scrupled to divulge. As for Vermandois's
pretended disgrace, and the King's refusal to
see him, we find that on the earliest rumour of
his illness at Courtrai, Louis sends word that

* " I was not sorry for the death of M. de Vermandois," she says
in this same volume of the Mdmoires.

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 41

he is to be brought back to court as quickly as
possible, " where he can be surrounded with
every care."*

" Is there need," asks Topin, " to insist
upon the impossibility of admitting that a son
and heir of Louis XIV. could receive the
gravest insult in the midst of the court, and
no allusion be made to the fact by a single
contemporary writer ? " Further to diminish
the probability of the tale, the author of the
Me'moires Secrets shows us in Vermandois, that
mirror of courteous chivalry, an unmannerly
and treasonable cub, unable to keep his hands
from the brother who was one day to be his
king. Finally, the brothers are described as
" d pen pres du meme age" whereas there were
six years between them ; Vermandois at the
period of this display of ungovernable temper
being but sixteen, while the Dauphin was
already the father of the Due de Bourgogne.

* The King to the Marquis de Montchevreuil, Nov. 4, 1683.

42 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

The untimely death of Vermandois is a fact
that cannot be disputed, nor is there in his last
earthly moments, or in the transport of his
remains to Arras, where they were interred,
a circumstance which provokes the faintest
degree of suspicion.

It was on the 6th of November, 1683,
that the young Count took to his bed at
Courtrai. He had been sickening for
some days, but would not admit it, so deter-
mined was he to take part in the attack on
Menin, " where he gave proofs of the highest
courage."

His fever increased rapidly ; on the 12th of
the month Marshal d'Humieres communicated
his condition to the minister Louvois ; on the
13th word was sent to the court. Three days
later, on the 16th, it is announced* that the
patient has just received the sacrament, and

* Archives du ministere de la guerre. De Boufflers a Louvois,
Cited by Topin.

Louise de la Valliere, as a Carmelite Nun.
From an engraving after D. a. Plaats.

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 45

that ton riespere plies que dans sa jeunesse.
On the second day from this, November 18th,
the son of la Valliere died of malignant fever
in the presence of Marshal d'Humieres, the
Marquis de Montchevreuil, and Lieutenant-
General Boufflers. " In the camp, distress was
general. They wept for the good he had
achieved, and for the promises of greatness
unfulfilled." Mademoiselle de la Valliere " is
all day at the foot of her crucifix."

On the 27th of November, before an im-
mense and brilliant crowd of witnesses, Ver-
mandois was laid with pomp in the choir of
the cathedral church of Arras. By the King's
command, a requiem mass was said in the
same place every day during the remainder of
the year ; and provision was ordered to be
made for a solemn service, preceded by vigils,
on the 1 8th of November, each year, "a
perpetuite." Doles were to be given to the
poor of Arras on this day, "that they might

46 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

pray for the soul's welfare of the Comte de
Vermandois." Up to the year of the Re-
volution, 1789, all these stipulations of the act
drawn up with the chapter of the cathedral, in
the name of Louis XIV., " were scrupulously
fulfilled."

To sum up. If the amiable and chivalrous
Vermandois struck the Dauphin, as the legend
of the " Contribution to the History of Persia "
maintains, the proof has not come down to
us. If for this deed Louis XIV. condemned
a favourite son to lifelong imprisonment, the
proof is not less in request. The dispatches
concerning the successive phases of the illness
of Vermandois, his death at Courtrai, his burial
in the cathedral of Arras, are in existence.
And, as regards Louis XIV. (who held such
things profoundly sacred), what an awful and
most impious derision is in that pomp of burial,
and in those masses celebrated during a
hundred years, if the coffin in the choir were

THE DEATH OF VERMANDOIS. 4 7

tenantless, and Vermandois a living prisoner in
the dungeon of Pignerol !

There is but to add that this version of the
mystery, adopted by Freron in 1768, and by
the unknown author of the Histoire du fils dun
Roi y in 1789, has lain for above a century in
well-merited neglect.

48

CHAPTER II.

The systeme Vermandois was a choice

The

Ewer Brother regale in its way, but a dish more de-
and lectable was preparing. The Legend

the Twin.

was not to be world-famous till it
had made of the Iron Mask a brother of
Louis XIV. Of this system there were
several branches. Thus, the Mask was : —

i. A son of Anne of Austria and some
lover undiscovered.

2. A son of Anne of Austria and the
Duke of Buckingham.

3. A son of Anne of Austria and Cardinal
Mazarin ;

or

4. A twin brother of Louis XIV.

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 49

Later, under the First Empire, there were
new and very elegant conceits. Taking up
the theory of the twin brother, the Baron de
Gleichen had asserted, and had been at pains
to prove, "that it was the true heir to the
throne who was put out of sight, to the profit
of a child of the Queen and the Cardinal.
Having become masters of the situation on
the death of the King [Louis XIII.], they
substituted their son for the Dauphin, the
substitution being facilitated by a strong
likeness between the children."* The dire con-
sequences of this hypothesis strike the eye
at once : it nullifies in the most absolute
fashion the legitimacy of all the remaining
Bourbons.

After a period of repose in the shades, the
ghost of the Baron de Gleichen awoke and
stalked forth into the First Empire, where all
the talents were probing the dust of the Man

* Funck-Brentano.

4

5 o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

in the Iron Mask. Here is the contribution of
the Baron's ghost to the bewildering topic of
debate. " Louis XIV. had been a mere bastard,
the child of foreigners. The lawful heir had
been imprisoned at the Isles of Sainte-
Marguerite, where he had married the daughter
of one of his gaolers. Of this marriage a child
was born, who, as soon as he was weaned, was
despatched to Corsica, and there entrusted to a
safe person, as a child coming of ' good stock '
— in Italian, Buona-parte. It is from this child
that the Emperor was directly descended. The
true claim of Napoleon I. to the throne of
France established by the Iron Mask ! — How
came the great Dumas to miss that great
discovery ? " *

Note has been made of the suggestion that
Voltaire was the author of the unsigned
" Contribution to the History of Persia." He
affected to treat it in public as an " obscure,

* Funck-Brentano.

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 51

ridiculous pamphlet," but he was exceedingly
quick to appreciate the interest it had aroused.
Surely that tale of Vermandois and the Dauphin,
and the fond King who would not slay his son,
might be improved upon ! Now Voltaire had,
as Matthew Arnold says of Macaulay, "his
own heightened and telling way of putting
things " ; and of that heightened and telling
way of his there is no more effective illustration
than the surmise upon the Mask with which he
witched the world. People have gone on re-
peating it — not as surmise but as history — even
to the present day. In how many minds does
not the mention of the Man in the Iron Mask
conjure up the image of a brother of the Grand
Monarque ? This story, nevertheless, is un-
supported by any document that ever yet was
vouched for ; not in all the archives of France
is there one single piece to stay it on ; nor
will it tally (and this were indispensable)

with the dates of the changing periods in

4 #

52 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Saint- Mars's career. In a word, from the
day that the State papers of France became
available, no seeker of the truth could
continue his belief in the divination of
Voltaire : so far as criticism was concerned
it perished, accordingly, in the cataclysm of
the Revolution.

Let us see how adroitly Voltaire went to
work. In the first edition of his " Age of
Louis XIV.," published in 1751, he wrote: —
" Some months after the death of Mazarin, an
event happened which is without a parallel in
history. Moreover, and this is not less re-
markable, the event has been passed over in
silence by every historian. There was sent
with the utmost secrecy to the castle of the Isles
of Sainte-Marguerite, in the Sea of Provence,
a prisoner unknown, of a stature above the
average, young, and with features of rare
nobility and beauty. On the way, the prisoner
wore a mask, the chinpiece of which was

•

Voltaire.
After De la Tour.

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 55

furnished with springs of steel, so that he
could eat without removing it. Order had
been given to kill him if he ventured to
uncover. He remained at the Isles until a
trusted officer, Saint-Mars by name, governor
of Pignerol, having been appointed in 1690 to
the command of the Bastille, came to Sainte-
Marguerite to fetch him, and bore him thence —
always in his mask — to the Bastille. Before
his removal, he was seen in the Isle by the
Marquis de Louvois, who remained standing
while he spoke to him with a consideration
savouring of respect. In the Bastille, the
unknown was as well bestowed as was possible
in that place, and nothing that he asked for was
refused him. He had a passion for lace and
fine linen ; he amused himself with the guitar ;
and his table was furnished with the best. The
governor rarely sat down in his presence.
An old doctor of the Bastille, who had often
attended this interesting prisoner, said that,

56 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

although he had examined his tongue and the
rest of his body, he had never seen his face.
He was admirably made, said the doctor, and
his skin was of a brownish tint. He spoke
charmingly, with a voice of a deeply interesting
quality; never complaining of his lot, and
never letting it be guessed who he was. This
unknown captive died in 1703, and was buried
by night in the parish of Saint- Paul. What is
doubly astonishing is this : that when he was
sent to Sainte- Marguerite there did not dis-
appear from Europe any personage of note.
This was he, beyond a doubt, for observe what
happened within a few days of his arrival
at the Isle. The governor himself laid the
prisoner's table, and then withdrew and locked
the door. One day the prisoner wrote some-
thing with a knife on a silver plate, and threw
the plate out of the window towards a boat on
the shore, almost at the foot of the tower.
A fisherman, to whom the boat belonged, picked

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 57

up the plate and carried it to the governor,
who, surprised beyond measure, asked the
man : ' Have you read what is written on this
plate, and has anyone seen it in your hands ? '
1 I cannot read,' answered the fisherman ; ' I
have only just found it, and no one else has
seen it.' He was detained until the governor
had made sure that he could not read, and that
no other person had seen the plate. ' Go,' he
then said, ' It is well for you that you cannot
read.'" *

It will be seen that Voltaire does not say

* The reader will be interested in comparing with this the version
which Pere Papon gives in his Histoire Ge'ne'ralede Provence. Here, it will
be observed, the issue is more tragical. Says Father Papon : "I met
in the Citadel an officer of the Free Company, aged seventy-nine. He
told me more than once that a frater of that company saw one day,
under the prisoner's window, some white thing floating on the water.
He brought it to shore, and carried it to M. de Saint-Mars. It was a
shirt of very fine linen, carelessly folded, which the prisoner had com-
pletely covered with writing. Unfolding it, and reading a few lines,
M. de Saint-Mars, with an air of great embarrassment, asked the frater
if he had not had the curiosity to read it himself. The frater declared
over and over again that he had read nothing ; nevertheless, two days
later, he was found dead in his bed."

58 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

as yet who his extraordinary prisoner was.
" He observed the impression his story had
produced. Then, growing bolder, he in-
sinuated in the first edition of the ' Questions
on the Encyclopaedia' that, if the prisoner
were masked, it was a precaution taken to
prevent the recognition of a certain striking
likeness. He still withheld the name, but
every ear was straining now for some impos-
ing revelation." *

It came at last, in the second edition
of the " Questions on the Encyclopaedia."
This time Voltaire, afraid to captain his
fantasy, took cover behind his publisher.
The paragraph had better be translated at
length : —

" The Iron Mask was without doubt a
brother, and an elder brother, of Louis XIV.,
whose mother had that taste for fine linen
with which M. de Voltaire has re-enforced his

* Funck-Brentano.

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 59

case.* Reading the contemporary Memoirs in
which this anecdote of the Queen finds men-
tion, I had not a doubt that this was her son, a
conclusion to which various other circumstances
had already guided me. It is known that
Louis XIII. had long ceased to share the
Queen's couch, and that the birth of Louis
XIV. was the fruit of a happy accident.
Here, as I believe, is the history of the affair :
The Queen had come to persuade herself that
hers alone was the fault which had deprived
Louis XIII. of an heir. The birth of the
Iron Mask undeceived her on that point.
The Cardinal,f to whom she had confided
her secret, saw where his advantage lay in
it. He could shape it at once to his own

*"It was made to appear — although nothing has ever been
advanced in proof — that the Mask was addicted to the wearing of
fine linen ; and Anne of Austria, we know, was particularly fond of
laces and embroideries. But this taste is not exactly confined to
royal families, and is perhaps a little insufficient to convict a queen of
adultery." — Vte. Maurice Boutry.

t Richelieu.

6o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

profit and to the profit of the State. Satisfied,
by what had occurred, that the Queen was
able to give children to France, he arranged
to bring her Majesty and the King together.
But both Queen and Cardinal being equally
persuaded of the necessity of concealing from
Louis XIII. the existence of the Iron Mask,
they had the child removed in secret.
Louis XIV. remained in ignorance of the
matter until after the death of Cardinal
Mazarin. Then, and not till then, did it
come to the knowledge of the King that
he had a brother living, an elder brother, more-
over, whom his mother could not possibly
disown, and in whom some signal likeness
might not improbably declare his origin.
Reflecting that this Prince, born in wedlock,
could not, without the gravest consequences
and most dire scandal, be pronounced illegiti-
mate after the decease of Louis XIII.,
Louis XIV. could have fallen on no measure

Anne of Austria.

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 63

wiser or more just than the one which he
adopted ; and that measure, in addition, while
securing his own safety and the tranquillity
of the State, spared him an act of cruelty
which a sovereign less conscientious and
less magnanimous would have accepted as
necessary."

" What unlikelinesses, what contradictions,
what abounding errors have we here," ex-
claims Topin, within the compass of a page or
two ! This strange unknown whom no one is
allowed to look upon, whose doctor even
may never see him unmasked, yet who is
confidently asserted to be beautiful and noble
of feature : Saint-Mars appointed to the
Bastille in 1690 (eight years before he received
that command), and traversing all France
to seek a prisoner for whom, during twenty-
eight years, some other gaoler has sufficed :
this mask with the steel springs which covers
the prisoner's visage night and day without

64 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

destroying his health : that beatific resigna-
tion to his lot, and unwillingness to disclose
his identity, on the part of a prisoner who
flings silver plates out of window after com-
mitting to them some history which all but
sends the governor into an apoplexy : her
Majesty's taste for fine linen, so extremely
unfortunate, since it is presently to be trans-
formed into invincible proof of the birth of
an unlawful child : this Queen, again, who has
been already three times enceinte, heaping
herself with reproaches that she can give
the King no heir : her infatuated resolve to
share with Richelieu, a sworn enemy, the
secret of a guilty intrigue : a Queen of France,
in the momentous hour of child-birth, with no
confidant but the prime minister : and these
two tremendous events, the birth and stealthy
removal of a royal child, so shrewdly dis-
simulated that not a single Memoir of the
period has mention of them — these are

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 65

among the first reflections which this amazing
narrative suggests.*

And now for the history, not less diverting
and equally veracious, of the Twin. This is
the invention wrought by the Abbe Soulavie
into his apocryphal Memoir es du Marechal
Due de Richelieu, first published in London
in 1790. Written in a not inelegant French,
we are asked to accept it as the composition
of Saint-Mars,f who, incapable of a literary
sentence, groaned over the spelling of a six-
line despatch.

" The unhappy Prince whom I brought up,"
said the governor, " and of whom I had charge
to the end of his days, was born the 5th of
September, 1638, at half-past eight in the
evening, while the King was at supper.

* Adapted from Topin.

t " Relation de la naissance et de l'education du prince infortune
soustrait par les cardinaux Richelieu et Mazarin a la societe et ren-
ferme par l'ordre de Louis XIV., composed par le gouverneur de ce
prince au lit de mort." — M<?m., vol. III., ch. iv.

66 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

His brother, now reigning as Louis XIV.,
was born at twelve noon, his father being at
dinner. The pomp and ceremony which
attended the birth of the King contrasted
wretchedly with that of his brother, which
was closely concealed. Louis XIII. was in-
formed from the Queen's chamber that her
Majesty was about to be delivered of a second
child ; and this double birth had already been
predicted to him by two shepherds, who had
said in Paris that if the Queen should bring
two Dauphins into the world, the State were
lost. Cardinal de Richelieu, consulted by
the King, replied that, " if two children were
born, the second must be put out of sight,
since he might one day claim the throne.
Tormented by uncertainty as to what course
he should follow, the King's distress was
overwhelming when the pains of the second
accouchement began." The twin was born,
" daintier and prettier than his elder," and the

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 67

midwife was charged with his safe keeping !
Where the luckless infant was secreted we
are not told ; merely that dame Peronnette,
the pearl of midwives, reared him as one of
her own, and that he was given out for some
nobleman's love-child : an ideally simple little
method of disposing of a Child of France.

At first, it is the great Richelieu him-
self who undertakes the education of this
untimely prince, destined, in the event
of the Dauphin's death, to succeed to
the throne. Then, to resume the legend
so absurdly fathered on Saint-Mars, " the
cardinal confided him to the governor, who
was to bring him up as the son of a king,
but in strict secrecy. The governor took him
to his own estate in Burgundy. The Queen-
mother seemed to fear that if the birth of this
young Dauphin became known the malcontents
of the kingdom would rise in his behalf, because
of the belief (held from certain of the faculty)

5*

66 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

that the last-born of twin brothers is the first
conceived, and, in consequence, the rightful
heir. Nevertheless, Anne of Austria could
not bring herself to destroy the documents
which established the birth of her son. At
the age of nineteen, this State secret was dis-
covered by the prince while spying in a casket
of his governor, where he came upon letters
of the Queen and of the Cardinals Richelieu
and Mazarin. . . .

" The governor wrote to the Court asking
for instructions, and both he and his charge
were ordered to be imprisoned," &c.

Soulavie has had for his principal supporters
Dulaure, in his Histoire de Paris (1821) ;
Fournier and Arnould, in the drama put for-
ward at the Odeon ; Alexandre Dumas, in the
Vicomte de Bragelonne ; Levasseur, in a volume
of the Memoir es pour Tons (1835) ; and the
historians Sismondi and Michelet.

These, then, are the two main branches of

ELDER BROTHER AND THE TWIN. 69

the system which sets up the Iron Mask as
a brother of Louis XIV. ; Voltaire's prevailing
story of an elder brother, with Mazarin as the
putative father ; and Soulavie's creation, more
romanesque, if possible, of the twin who
vanishes in the instant of his appearance.
With these is linked, and will fall naturally
into line, the story of the Queen and
Buckingham. Topin sets out upon his refu-
tation of the entire system by asking when
and in what circumstances this most equi-
vocal brother of Louis XIV. — whether elder
or twin — could have contrived to slip unseen
into the world ? His birth has been placed
at three different dates. Choice may be
made, for instance, of 1625, after the famous
visit of the Duke of Buckingham to France ;
of 1 63 1, following on that grave sickness of
Louis XIII., which had given rise to fears
that his hated brother, Gaston d'Orleans,
might be called to the throne ; or, lastly,

70 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

1638, eight or nine hours after the birth of
Louis XIV. If the refutation is to be
decisive, it should leave no doubt upon the
mind that the birth of another Dauphin was
as mythical as his subsequent misfortunes.

7i

CHAPTER III

The
Infatuation

of
Buckingham.

It was in May, 1625, that the
brilliant Buckingham went to Paris,
charged by Charles I. to conduct
to England his bride Henrietta
Maria. Charles's ambassador had been wel-
comed in advance by Louis XIII. " I do
assure you," that King had written, " you will
be regarded here, not as a stranger, but as a
true Frenchman, for indeed you are one at
heart." And Richelieu had said to the Marquis
d'Effiat : " M. de Buckingham will find in me a
brother." Indeed, Buckingham knew France
well, and had acquired in that country not a
little of the grace and gloss of manner which
have been worth so much to his memory.

72 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

We are not at this day to bestow much praise
upon this elegant and handsome trifler, no
fit counsellor for kings, though he had been
counsellor to two ; but the courtier shone very
fine in him, and he was an eminently splendid
figure in a pageant. He made a superb
entry at the Court of France, " with more
pomp and glitter than if he had been King,"
says La Rochefoucauld. Madame de Motteville
adds that the Duke seemed to have treasuries
at command, and all the Crown Jewels of
England to heighten the splendour of his
wardrobe. In the first volume of the Hard-
wicke State Papers is an account of the
" vastly rich cloaths " he took with him, " the
number of his servants, and of the noble
Personages in his train." A suit of purple
satin, " embroidered all over with rich orient
pearls," was valued at .£20,000, and another
of " white satin uncut velvet, set all over
with diamonds," at four times that amount.

INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM. 73

Paris was amazed at the prodigality of
his display. Certain jewels on the costumes
that he changed incessantly were sewn
with such ingenious lack of skill that they
detached themselves and rolled away, " and
when they were brought back to him the Duke
would by no means receive them." Great
noblemen were in his suite ; he had seven
grooms of the chamber, thirty chief yeomen,
and twenty-two cooks, with pages, footmen,
grooms, huntsmen, outriders, musicians, and
watermen. Three coaches lined with velvet
and smothered in gold lace had eight horses
and six coachmen apiece ; and the Duke had
his barge, with twenty-two rowers " all in sky-
coloured tafTety." What with his attendant
knights, and the pages of the knights, his train
numbered six or seven hundred persons. He
was the hero of the town and of the court.

Dazzled, it may have been, by his own
magnificence, giddy with the flatteries that were

74 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

lavished on him, Buckingham at the Court of
Louis XIII. could see none worthy of his own
homage but the young, charming, and vivacious
Queen. He fell violently in love with Anne of
Austria, who was now between twenty-four
and twenty-five years of age. ' The Queen,
being a Spaniard, was a natural coquette ;
and Madame de Motteville, than whom no
one knew her better, says that Anne of Austria
was not disposed to blame a certain open
and honest gallantry " ou on ne prend aucun
engagement particulier " — in other words,
which involves no notion of compromise.
" She accepted with a certain kindness and
no seeming surprise a passion which, while
evoking memories of her own country, and
even pleasing her amour-propre, offered no
peril to her virtue." If, however, the
numerous fetes in Buckingham's honour
brought him often in the presence of the
Queen, the Court was witness of their meet-

George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, and his Assassination.

From an engraving after C. Johnson.

INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM. 77

ings ; and though this was a circumstance
which Buckingham might regret, it justified the
confidence of her Majesty.

A week of great parade came to an end,
and Henrietta Maria, gorgeously escorted,
began her progress towards England.
Louis XIII., falling unwell, got no farther
than Compiegne. Anne of Austria, with her
mother-in-law, Marie de Medici, accompanied
the bride to Amiens, where the ballets, the
masques, and the banquets were renewed.
Buckingham, it is said, invented causes of
delay, that he might still be haunting the
skirts of Anne. As Amiens contained no
palace capable of lodging three queens
together, their Majesties were separately
housed ; Anne of Austria in a sumptuous
building in the midst of a great garden on the
banks of the Somme. Here the young Queen
and her Court would often stroll, and here she
found herself with Buckingham one evening,

78 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

but not alone. Lord Holland had the Duchesse
de Chevreuse on his arm, and all the ladies
of the Queen's suite were in attendance.
Buckingham conducted Anne ; and it would
appear that, emboldened by the nearness
of their hour of separation, he grew more
ardent in his suit. Night was falling, and at
the turning of an alley he threw himself at the
Queen's feet and besought her passionately.
She, " alarmed, and alive on a sudden to the
danger she was in, gave a loud cry ; and
Putange, her equerry, who was walking a
few paces behind, rushed up and seized
Buckingham. In a moment the whole Court
was on the scene, and Buckingham disappeared
in the crowd." *

Two days later, Hei^rietta Maria was on her
way to Boulogne ; Marie de Medici, her
mother, and Anne of Austria, her sister-in-law,
going with her to the gates of Amiens. It

* Topin.

INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM. 79

was on the step of Anne's carriage that
Buckingham said his farewell ; " burying his
face in the window-curtain to conceal his
tears." The Princesse de Conti, who rode with
the Queen, said to her (on Madame de Motte-
ville's assurance), that, "although she could
answer to the King for the virtue of her
Majesty, she would say less for her on the
score of kindness — and she thought the
Queen's eyes held a kind of pity for the
defeated lover."

But Anne had not seen quite the last of him.
Contrary winds stayed Charles's bride at
Boulogne, and Buckingham the proud, who
had stormed Paris in a cuirass of diamonds,
crept back to Amiens, with Lord Holland for
accomplice, pretending that a letter of import-
ance for Marie de Medici had been forgotten.
It was early morning when he presented him-
self at Anne's palace; and the Queen, who had
just been bled for some ailment, was in bed,

80 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

with several of her ladies about her. In royal
houses, up to the era of the Revolution, the
bed-chamber was scarcely more private than
the boudoir, and Buckingham and Holland
were introduced. Buckingham " fell on his
knees at the bedside, kissed the coverlet, and
broke into a transport of passion, greatly to
the scandal of the maids of honour. The
Comtesse de Lannoi, entreating him to rise,
said severely that these were not French
ways." " I am not a Frenchman," replied
the Duke, and he continued to plead tenderly
with the Queen. Her Majesty, greatly em-
barrassed, could find nothing to say, until she
roused herself to reproach the Duke for his
boldness. But this she did with no great show
of indignation, and her heart was perhaps not
quite untouched." * Buckingham returned to
Boulogne, and never saw Anne of Austria
again.

* Topin.

INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM. 83

These are the two memorable scenes of
Amiens with which scandal was once very-
busy, but with which history, seeking proofs,
was never seriously concerned. During the
troubles of the Fronde, and the heat of civil
war, the hint of a criminal love between
Buckingham and the Queen, whose honour he
would very willingly have spoiled, was bruited
often ; but all the evidence goes to show that
Anne of Austria outwitted a passionate,
unscrupulous gallant, and was never for an
instant his victim. A kind of Spanish tender-
ness she may have felt for him, and we may
suspect her of no small skill in flirtation ; but,
as there is no particle of evidence to adduce,
accusation may go no farther. It is abundantly
clear that, so far as Buckingham was con-
cerned, the Queen was never without witnesses
to her conduct. Marie de Medici, who bore
her daughter-in-law no very goodwill at this
period, took upon herself to assure Louis XIII.

84 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK,

that he need not concern himself with rumour;
that even if the Queen had been willing to
demean herself she was so perpetually sur-
rounded that the opportunity could never
have offered. As for the impetuous indis-
cretions of Buckingham, the Queen had not
encouraged and could not well have prevented
them : in her younger days, said Madame de
Medici to her son, such things had happened
to herself.* Madame might have added that
the Due de Montmorency and the Due de
Bellegarde had both been in love with the
fascinating Queen of Louis XIII., and that
neither of them had fared one whit better than
Buckingham.

Says Topin: — " Nothing seems to accuse the
Queen save the persistent coldness towards her
of Louis XIII. But does this conduct date
from the visit of Buckingham to Paris ? Was
Louis so completely estranged from the Queen

* Memoires of La Porte.

INFATUATION OF BUCKINGHAM. 85

as has been supposed ? And may we seek in
this the proof of an act of infidelity on the
Queen's part, whether with Buckingham in
1625, as the result of love, or with some person
unknown, in 1630, as the result of deliberate
calculation, and to the end that, after the death
of Louis XIII., which at that moment seemed
imminent, she might reign in the name of her
illegitimate child, who, on the King's un-
expected recovery, must be hidden away, to
become later the Man in the Iron Mask ?"

86

CHAPTER IV.

Born within eight days of one

The Acquittal

0l another, Anne of Austria, Infanta
the queen. Q f Spain, and Louis, Dauphin of
France, may be said to have been pledged
in infancy. Astrologers had announced that,
delivered under one star, they were des-
tined to love each other, married or not
married. The little Anne lent a willing ear
to the wise men's predictions ; and when, at
the age of twelve, she was bidding good-bye
to the Due de Mayenne, who had come to
Madrid to sign the marriage contract, she
instructed him to tell the King that she was
"extremely impatient to see him." Her
governess was shocked, but the Infanta replied
that it had always been recommended to her
to speak the truth. Two years later, in 1615,

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 87

she was a bride of fourteen, and as enthusiastic
as ever about the boy she had married.

Much less enthusiastic was the boy. He
had always declared that he hated the
Spaniards, " because they are the enemies of
Papa " ; and on two occasions, when his father,
Henri IV., talked to him of his future marriage
with the Infanta, he gave stubborn answers in
the negative. He was grave and observant
for his years, intolerant of the King's mistresses
who tried to conciliate him, and precociously
fierce against their children, whom he would
not call his brothers and would not suffer at
his table. After the death of Henry IV., the
boy-King shewed himself less and less in
sympathy with the gross speech and habits of
the Court, and was fonder of hawking than of
chambering.

The idea of marriage seems always to have
repelled him, and after four years of wedded
life, Anne was a wife only to the extent that

88 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the church had made her one. The conduct
of the King had become, indeed, almost a
question of State. His determined abstention
had moved the French Court, it had offended
the Court of Spain, it was regarded as a slight
by the papal nuncio and the Court of Tuscany,
whose aid had been considerable in bringing
about the union.

In January, 1619, some kind of rapproche-
ment seems to have been effected, but the
hopes that were built on it were disappointed.
Again in 1622 it was said with confidence
that an heir to the throne might be expected,
but almost immediately afterwards the Queen
was the victim of an accident. The visit of
Buckingham left the King unmoved, and had
no result in modifying his relations with the
Queen. Having freed himself from his
mother's yoke, Louis XIII. passed absolutely
under that of Richelieu ; and jealously as the
cardinal-minister watched the young sovereign,

Louis XIII.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 91

he was yet more jealous in his surveillance of
the Queen, an object of his implacable resent-
ment. Is it possible for one moment to believe
in an intrigue of hers, with Buckingham, with
Mazarin, or with another, which Richelieu
fails to know of, whose spies penetrated to the
inmost recesses of the Court ? And knowing
it, would he have hesitated an instant to ruin
the woman whom he hated, by confiding his
knowledge to the King ?

Let us consider next the circumstances of
the illness of Louis XIII. in 1630. The King
fell ill at Lyons, not, says Topin, at the
beginning of August (which has been asserted),
but on the 22nd of September; " and here
the dates are of the utmost importance." On
the 29th, an exhausting dysentery added itself
to a severe attack of fever, and at midnight
the doctors despaired of saving him. He took
a tender farewell of the Queen, and entreated
her forgiveness for all things. Towards noon

92 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

of the next day the King still lingered, and
the Archbishop of Lyons was preparing to
administer extreme unction, when the doctors,
who had already bled the enfeebled body six
times, ordered a seventh bleeding. This
would assuredly have carried off the patient,
but before the operation could be performed
the true cause of the malady revealed itself:
an abscess in the stomach broke, and the
King was saved.

On his recovery, Louis XIII. quitted Lyons
with the Queen, whose unaffected tender-
ness and solicitude at his sick bed had
touched him closely. " In that crisis, both
had forgotten the past. The coldness of the
one was overcome, the wounded pride of the
other was healed." Exulting in her unwonted
empire, it was not enough for the Queen to
have won a tardy place in her husband's
heart ; she desired to complete her triumph
by casting down the minister who had -opposed

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 93

himself between them, and, at one moment,
she had nearly been successful — but the King
could rule only by the Cardinal.

In January, 1631, the Queen was manifestly
enceinte. Supposing this the result of a
criminal intrigue, at what date should the
commencement of the pregnancy be placed ?

" Is it, as was asserted, at the moment and
by reason of the apparently imminent death
of Louis XIII.? But the Queen was delivered
within the first five days of April ; consequently
the child, conceived the 30th of September,
would by no means have attained the full
period, and could not, therefore, have become
the Man in the Iron Mask.* Was it on the
arrival of Louis XIII. at Lyons early in the
August of 1630? But at this date, Anne of
Austria had not the vital motive for becoming
a mother, which, according to her accusers,

* The medical science of the present day might succeed in saving
such a child ; but the chances would be very slight indeed.

94 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

she had on the 30th of September, when the
King lay on the threshold of death. Either,
then, the child is born incapable of living,
or its conception mounts to an epoch which
makes Louis XIII. the father, because the
Queen had no need to procure herself an heir
by unlawful means."

The truth is, that this, the third pregnancy
of Anne of Austria, traces to the reconciliation
which followed on the desperate illness of
the King. Richelieu himself is a witness here.
" If France should be blessed with this
fortune," he wrote, "it will be the fruit of
God's blessing, and of the kindly relations
established of late between his Majesty and
the Queen." * Not a word on Richelieu's part
which inculpates or seeks to inculpate the

* Lett res et papier s de Richelieu. Found among the letters and
documents which passed from the hands of the Duchesse d'Aiguillon,
Richelieu's niece, to the Archives de VEtat, and which were published
by the learned Avenet in his collection of Documents inedits de
Vhistoire de France.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 95

Queen, and it has been observed with justice,
that history could never hope to be better
instructed than that " clairvoyant and pitiless

minister."

Not for seven years were the ardent hopes
of the nation to be realised. On the 5th of
September, 1638, Anne of Austria gave birth
to a son who was to ascend the throne as
Louis XIV. This is also the day which has
been assigned to the birth of the Iron Mask
by those who, rejecting the theory of an
illegitimate child, have pronounced for that
of a twin brother, born in the evening, " and
condemned, for his tardy arrival, to perpetual
imprisonment." The problem of the twin is
briefly to be considered. In no country in
Europe, perhaps, was the birth of a royal child
more jealously scrutinised, more elaborately
and minutely attested, than in the France of
the Monarchy. Such an event might over-
whelm the expectations of a collateral heir,

96 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

or might ruin the prospects of a party.
Precautions the most extraordinary were
employed, precautions which may be said,
practically, to have excluded the possibility
of fraud or deception. Not only were the
greatest persons in the State compelled to be
eye-witnesses of the event, but the people
itself was summoned " to assist "at the birth
of the Child of France. The doors of the
royal dwelling were flung open in this solemn
hour, the people thronged in, and passed freely
into the innermost chambers of the palace.
Madame Campan relates how, at the birth
of the first child of Marie Antoinette, the room
in which the Queen lay was so intolerably
crowded that Louis XVI. broke a window
to let in more air. Indeed, this practice, so
distressing and humiliating to the royal mother,
was invariable and all but immemorial.

It was not omitted at the birth of Louis XIV.
At five o'clock on the morning of the 5th of

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 97

September, 1638, Louis XIII. was summoned
to the Queen's chamber, where he remained
until he had the happiness to know that a
son and heir had been born to him. At
six, there arrived in succession at Saint-
Germain, the King's brother, Gaston d'Orleans
(who had a vital interest in assuring him-
self that the birth was genuine), the Prin-
cesse de Conde, Madame de Vendome, the
Chancellor, Madame de Lansac (the future
governess of the prince) and Mesdames de
Senecey and de la Flotte of the royal house-
hold. Close to the Queen's couch an altar
had been raised, where the Bishops of Lisieux,
Meaux, and Beauvais pronounced mass in
turn. Pressing up to the altar and flowing
out into the room beyond, were princesses,
dukes, duchesses, and bishops, " with a vast
crowd of the common folk who had invaded
the palace from an early hour, and who now
completely filled it."

7

98 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

At eleven a.m. precisely the Queen's pangs
were over, and the birth of a prince was
announced. The resentment, ill-concealed,
of Gaston d'Orleans did not escape a few
observant eyes, but passed almost unnoticed
amid the general joy. The melancholy Louis
XIII. broke into smiles, and called on those
around him to admire the fine proportions
of his son. Shortly afterwards, and in the
Queen's chamber, the Child of France was
baptised by the Bishop of Meaux, chaplain-in-
chief. A King's messenger was despatched
in all haste to bear the great news to
Paris, but the joyous cries of the populace
outran his horse all along the route, and
as the messenger galloped into the capital,
the bells were already swinging in every
church.

Meanwhile, what of the Twin ? The state-
ment of Soulavie was, it will be remembered,
that the Queen was delivered at eight in the

Cardinal Richelieu.
After Champaigne.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 101

evening of a second son, who, conformably
to Richelieu's counsel, was privily and at
once put away. The role here invented for
Richelieu was of such immense importance
that Soulavie should at least have been careful
to know where the Cardinal was at this capital
moment. For the truth is that Richelieu
was not at Saint-Germain at all. He had
quitted the Court at the end of July ; he was
at Saint-Quentin on the day of Louis XIV.'s
birth, and he did not return to Paris until
the 2nd of October. The letter of congratula-
tion which he wrote to their Majesties from
Saint-Quentin is printed in his Lettres et
papier s. Richelieu, then, is summoned in vain
as a principal instrument of the plot imagined
by Soulavie. As the Queen's enemy, he had
every interest to denounce her to the King ;
as her suppositious friend and accomplice,
he could scarcely have aided, at the distance
of Saint-Quentin, the conspiracy which must

io2 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

have been compressed within an hour at the
utmost in the palace of Saint-Germain.

But let Richelieu be dismissed from the
case. We are to receive as plausible the
suggestion that a twin brother of Louis XIV.
is born without the knowledge of the Court.
The birth is nine hours late, but the palace
is still swarming with the princes of the
family — and no one has heard of it. Or, it
is known to all, and all are agreed, for no
conceivable reason, to keep the secret. The
secret is so well kept, moreover, that never
once is it divulged or even hinted at in any
Memoir of the period. We have contem-
porary notices of Anne of Austria which are
scarcely discreet, and we have others which
are less than discreet ; but we have no record
of her by any writer of her own day which
contains the faintest reference to the surrep-
titious birth of a twin brother of Louis XIV.

Let this birth, however, be admitted. Let

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 103

it be supposed that, at eight in the evening,
the witnesses were few, and had pledged
themselves to secrecy. Was there any reason
for secrecy? Why should Louis XIII. be,
as Soulavie says, on the point of fainting
when he learns that he has two heirs instead
of one ? The question of the trouble that
might arise from the idea that the second
born is the first conceived is not admissible ;
for, never sanctioned in medicine, this em-
pirical theory had no recognition in the law
of France. From commoner to King, the
first-born was the heir. Far, therefore, from
being alarmed by the birth of a twin, Louis
XIII. had reason to praise his fortune, for
the right of inheritance was now doubly
consolidated in his own family.

Once more, however, for the rounding off
of the argument, let the impossible be received
and acquiesced in. This ambiguous son of
Anne of Austria is born, we will say. He is

104 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

brought into the world shortly before 1625, and
Buckingham is his father; or in 1631, when
Louis XIII. is believed to be dying, and
Mazarin, or some gallant unknown, is his
father; or in 1638, when he is presented to
us as the most interesting, the most romantic,
and the most unfortunate of twins. Entrusted
to some creature of consummate devotion and
discretion, he is reared in the country ; and
if, in the course of time, there is developed a
rather striking likeness to a certain Queen-
mother or a King, no one perceives it, or
those who do perceive it are polite enough
to refrain from questions. But at what epoch
was he imprisoned, and for what cause ?
" From the day that he becomes the famous
prisoner whom Saint-Mars conducts in 1698
from Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille, we
have the right to ask when, how, and in
what circumstances he was arrested and con-
fided to his gaoler ? "

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 105

He was allowed his liberty, we will suppose,
during the lifetime of Anne of Austria; that
would be not unreasonable, provided he were
kept out of sight. Was he imprisoned after
her death ? But Anne of Austria died in
January, 1666, and Saint-Mars receives no
prisoner. Did the arrest take place, as
Voltaire affirms, in 1661, after the death of
Mazarin ? But at this date, and three years
later, Saint-Mars was still an officer of
musketeers. It was not until December, 1664,
that he was appointed to the governorship
of Pignerol, where, in the following month,
he received Fouquet into his keeping. On
the 20th of August, 1669, arrives at Pignerol
a second prisoner, one Eustache Dauger.
But Dauger is known to us : an obscure
spy, he was given as a servant to Fouquet.
Is it likely that Saint- Mars would have
appointed to wait on Fouquet — who had
passed all his life near Louis XIV. and

io6 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Anne of Austria — a prince whose features
recalled the King's ? From the date of
Dauger's imprisonment no other prisoner is
sent to Saint-Mars until the Comte de
Lauzun goes to Pignerol in 167 1. After
that, at long intervals, other prisoners are
led thither, but they are all identified, their
crimes or their faults are known.

" We see them sometimes not too well
treated; and when, in i68r, Saint-Mars passes
from the command of Pignerol to that of
Exiles, he takes with him two prisoners
only, whom he styles contemptuously "a pair
of gaol-birds." At Exiles, at Pignerol, at
Sainte-Marguerite (which dungeon w T as taken
over by Saint-Mars in 1687), if new prisoners
are entrusted to him, we know to what
motives their incarceration may be attributed ;
and nothing in their past, nothing in their
treatment in prison, nothing in their conduct
allows us to suspect in any one of them a

Cardinal Mazarin.

After Mignard.

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 109

brother of Louis XIV. Needless to say,
Saint-Mars would not be likely to designate
his prince by name in any official despatch,
nor should proof of that kind be demanded.
But when, after having examined in turn all
the prisoners whom the future governor of
the Bastille had in his charge — and among
whom must of necessity be found that
mysterious one with whom he traversed
France in 1698 — we have satisfied ourselves
as to the causes of their arrest, and have
penetrated into their past ; when a hundred
authentic despatches* render it absolutely
certain that beyond these prisoners there
was no other, have we not reason to conclude
with the question : Where then is the son of
Anne d' Autriche ? " f

Tradition, fable, legend, ensnare us at

: * Archives du ministere de la marine. — Archives du ministere de la
guerre. — Archives du ministere des affaires itrangeres. — Archives
impiriales .\
t Topin.

no THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

every turn in this enquiry. Truth and fiction
are interwoven in the strangest manner.
Around every legendary hero the adventures
of other persons gradually group themselves,
and this has been signally the case with the
Man in the Mask. How interesting — in its
relation to the hypothesis of the king's
brother — is the story of the boundless defer-
ence shown to the prisoner, and the visit he
received at Sainte-Marguerite from the minis-
ter Louvois, who addresses him " with a
consideration savouring of respect." But we
shall see presently that no one goes out of
his way to show deference to the Mask ; and,
as for the visit of Louvois, that is pure in-
vention. In 1680 (eight years, be it noted,
before Saint-Mars took the Man in the
Mask to the Isles) Louvois, who had broken
his leg, went to Bareges for a few weeks to
complete his cure In Rousset's Histoire
de Louvois, we have the detailed itinerary

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN, m

of the journey, and Sainte- Marguerite is not
found in it ; nor, after this, was Louvois
ever again in the south of France. The
piquant episode of the silver plate (trans-
formed by Pere Papon into a linen shirt)
is bound up with the theory of a brother
or a twin brother of Louis XIV., and is
highly interesting as an example of the
commingling of fact with fiction in the
popular history of the Mask. The story of
the plate, as will be plain, has its origin in
the attempt at escape of a Protestant minis-
ter confined at Sainte-Marguerite in 1692.
Indeed, it was scarcely even an attempt at
escape : the Protestant minister writes some
complaint on his pewter-plate or vessel (is it
necessary to say that State prisoners of the
17th century were not served on silver?),
and flings it out of window. Out of this
commonplace fact has arisen the pungent
tale of the silver dish which is nearly the

ii2 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

death of the fisherman who rescues it. It
was believed — and it has still a kind of
illiterate currency.

There are legends which, doing hurt to
no one's memory, it seems almost a pity to
displace by fact ; but it is always grateful
to slay a fable which has involved a repu-
tation in disgrace. This has been the inte-
rest and the motive of refuting once again
the discarded and long-contemned invention
of Voltaire, which, modified variously by
successive writers, has crammed the mind of
Christendom. It may lessen the charm of
the story to remove from it the captivating
person of a brother of Louis XIV., but the
arid truth of history repeats that the Iron
Mask was not a son of Anne of Austria.
Who |has proved the birth of the pretended
prince ? Who 'will give the date of his
imprisonment ? Not even in the France of
the old Monarchy were royal infants delivered

THE ACQUITTAL OF THE QUEEN. 113

by the gods, and inscrutably concealed by
them. The malign concept of Voltaire
returns again to the rag-bag of Time — alms
meet for oblivion.

TI4

CHAPTER V.

English readers will not expect to

The Expiation

of be detained long over the case of
Monmouth. Monmouth. Monmouth's claims to
the mask were the imagination of an ex-officer
of French cavalry, by name Germain-Francois
Poullain de Saint-Foix.* Single-handed he
defended them, but with the valour of six. His
hypothesis was only too easily destroyed, and
perhaps its most valid title to respect during
the lifetime of Saint-Foix lay in his perfect
readiness to prove it at the point of the
rapier.

The early career of Monmouth scarcely con-
cerns us. The natural son of Charles II. and
Lucy Walter or Walters (the " browne, beauti-

* Born February 5, 1698; died August 25, 1776. — lung.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 115

ful, bold, but insipid creature " whom the diarist
Evelyn encountered in Paris), his father doted
on him, the Court spoiled him, and, in the
prime of manhood he was, for the general
people —

The young men's vision, and the old men's dream !

The line is Dryden's, and the famous flattery
of the picture in " Absalom and Achitophel "
may once again be cited : —

Early in foreign fields he won renown,
With kings and states allied to Israel's crown :
In peace the thoughts of war he could remove,
And seem'd as he were only born for love.
Whate'er he did, was done with so much ease,
In him alone 'twas natural to please :
His motions all accompanied with grace ;
And Paradise was open'd in his face.

History has rejected the verdict of Monmouth's
contemporaries. A man of brilliant looks and
most eminent graces of person, a polished
courtier, a sportsman, and (save at the crisis of
Sedgemoor) a brave man in battle : these were

certainly his best recommendations to the

8*

n6 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

general goodwill. He lacked almost every
element of greatness. His conduct of the
rebellion against James II. showed that he was
neither a leader nor an organiser ; defeated, he
left his devoted followers to their fate ; and, in
the most critical hour of his existence — the
interview with the implacable James — he dis-
played a cowardice and a baseness of spirit
which disgusted the King, amazed and shocked
the French ambassador, and drew down upon
his memory the scathing rebukes of Macaulay.
Day was not yet full come on the morning of
the 6th of July, 1685, when Monmouth, with
Grey and the German Buyse beside him, was
riding in flight from the lost field of Sedge-
moor. It is but just to say that, up to the
moment^at which he knew himself defeated, he
had fought, on foot and pike in hand, like a
stalwart soldier. But the moment of defeat
was surely the one in which a rebel of courage
and of heart would remember the men whom he

Charles II.

From an engraving by Sherwln. [The wax effigy in Westminster Abbey

was modelled from this' engraving.]

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 119

had summoned to his flag. History has few
more touching instances of devotion to a feeble
cause than those which the wretched memory
of Sedgemoor will eternally evoke. Those
" Mendip miners " and poor peasants, with
their scythes and bludgeons and a few old
rusty guns, who shouted for " King
Monmouth " while Monmouth was among
them, and who tried to stem the whirlwind
of James's cavalry when Monmouth had
abandoned them, deserved to die for a
better treason, and for a nobler traitor.

There is no need to rehearse again the
details of the flight and capture of Monmouth.
He must have realised his doom in the hour
of his arrest, and it remained to him only to
meet it as the son of a king, and as the van-
quished leader of an ineffectual revolt. But
twice he failed, and despicably, in the fortitude
that inspires the great insurgent. He had
abandoned his heroic peasants when his mili-

J20 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

tary knowledge told him that the battle had
gone to the King ; and he abandoned his own
manhood when he found himself in James's
clutches. His letter to the King from Ring-
wood is branded by Macaulay as "that of a
man whom a craven fear had made insensible
to shame" — his behaviour in the interview with
the King degrades him deeper still. It was an
interview which James II. should never have
accorded. He was justified in sending to the
scaffold an enemy who had not only usurped
the title of king, but whose proclamation was
charged with hideous libels ; but, having
resolved upon the death of Monmouth, James
should not, in common humanity, have
admitted him to his presence. That cruel
favour, worthy of the most resentful sovereign
in English history, tempted the beaten and
broken Monmouth to plead miserably and most
ignominiously for the life which was already
lost to him.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 121

With his arms bound, Monmouth grovelled
on the floor at the King's feet ; tried to
embrace him by the knees ; begged for life, for
life only. The champion of Protestantism — a
position which had disgraced him with his
father, and the plea which had supported his
rebellion against his uncle — he offered, in his
last desperate extremity, to become a Catholic.
James turned from him in contempt, and
Monmouth's final hope was extinguished.

It is at this dramatic moment that M.
Germain-Francois Poullain de Saint-Foix ap-
propriates the doomed adventurer, hands him
over to Louis XIV., who passes him on to
Saint-Mars, who transforms him into the Man
in the Mask.

James the unforgiving, it is pretended, for-
gave his nephew on the very eve of the fate
he had ordained for him ; and Louis of France
consented to receive and lodge him for life in
one of his convenient dungeons. This, of

122 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

course, implies that it was not Monmouth, but
some magnanimous substitute for that prince,
whom Ketch, with the clumsiness of fright,
mangled to death on Tower Hill, on the morn-
ing of the 15th of July, 1685. How then was
the fraud accomplished ? With the ease which
. might be expected, when a relenting sovereign
and uncle needs fortune's aid. An officer of
Monmouth, condemned with him to the axe,
and strikingly like the Duke, agreed to per-
sonate him on the scaffold ! Prelates not
acquainted with Monmouth were chosen to
attend his last moments, and the execution was
hurried, that there might be no opportunity for
a " dying speech " to the crowd, and no oppor-
tunity for the crowd to recognise the generous
impostor. The situation would no doubt be
an extremely taking one in the theatre ; but it
was not the situation on the morning of
Monmouth's death. The divines by whom he
was accompanied to Tower Hill were the same

The Duke of Monmouth.
From a contemporary German Broadsheet.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 125

who had exhorted him in the Tower ; and the
scene on the scaffold, far from being hurried,
was so protracted that it must have been an
agony to the spectators who had thronged in
thousands to see their idol die. Nor was there
any unseemly eagerness on the part of those
in attendance upon Monmouth to send their
victim in silence to the block : on the contrary,
as will be seen, it was Monmouth himself who
held back, when urged by them to address the
soldiers.

It is when he comes to the proof that Saint-
Foix, as may be imagined, is so terribly hard
put to it. He has not even stubble for his
bricks. Beyond the tradition of the feigned
execution of Monmouth (which was for many
years a cherished belief of our own west-
country peasants), he offers only the vaguest
of rumours and the idlest of conjectures. He
cites (with a confession of little confidence) an
anonymous libel published in Amsterdam and

126 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Paris, under the title Amours de Charles II
et de Jacques II. , rois d 1 Angleterre, wherein
Skelton, whom William of Orange had re-
moved from the lieutenancy of the Tower, is
reported as informing Lord Danby that "on
the night after the pretended execution of the
Duke of Monmouth, the King, accompanied
by three men, came himself to remove him
from the Tower. They covered his head with
a kind of hood, and the King and the three
mounted with him into a coach." Although
this tract is put forward by Saint-Foix as one
of his principal pieces, he spoils at a stroke
whatever worth it may have had for him by
the candid admission that it should be classed
with "those books whose authors seek only to
entertain their readers."

His next witness is one Nelaton, a surgeon,
and a haunter of that hot-bed of gossip the
Cafe Procope. which has but lately disappeared
from Paris. Nelaton's friends of the Cafe were

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH 127

familiar with a story which he did not tire of
rehearsing : how that, being chief assistant to
a surgeon near the Porte Saint-Antoine, he was
sent one day to bleed a prisoner of the Bastille ;
the governor took him into the chamber of the
prisoner, whose head was covered with a long
towel knotted on the neck ; the prisoner
complained of great pains in the head ; he
wore a dressing-gown of black and yellow,
ornamented with large fleurs d'or — and the
surgeon's assistant perceived by the prisoner's
accent that he was an Englishman. How and
by whom the Englishman with his head veiled
in a towel was identified with Monmouth, Saint-
Foix omits to say.

From the Cafe Procope the simple advo-
cate conducts his audience to the boudoir of
that light-behaved celebrity, the Duchess of
Portsmouth. " Father Tournemine has often
repeated to me that, paying a visit to the
Duchess of Portsmouth with Father Sanders,

128 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the ancient confessor of King James, the
Duchess told them that she should always re-
proach the memory of that sovereign with the
execution of the Duke of Monmouth, remem-
bering that Charles II., in the hour of his death
and on the point of receiving the sacrament,
had made him promise before the Host (which
the priest Huldeston * had secretly conveyed),
that, whatever rebellion Monmouth might at-
tempt, he would never put him to death. —
' Madame,' answered Father Sanders with
vivacity, 'he did not put him to death.' '

And here, to conclude, is ■ Saint-Foix's
crowning proof: On the rumour in London,
which gathered as it rolled, that an officer re-
sembling Monmouth had been decapitated in
his stead, a "grande dame" — not named to us —
bribed certain persons — not named to us — to
open the coffin; and, "having looked closely

* Huddleston, the priest who had saved Charles's life after the
battle of Worcester, and who received his last confession.

IAMKS II BY V

j OF4&OB KlKTG J

James II.
From an engraving by Claes Visscher.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 131

at the right arm, exclaimed — ' This is not
Monmouth!' "

Thus, for the confusion of later generations,
were systems of the Mask erected towards the
end of the eighteenth century. This is the
case, and the whole case of Germain-Francois
Poullain de Saint-Foix. And this is to stand
against the vouchers of eye-witnesses of Mon-
mouth's death, the written and extant testimony
of the bishops who stood with him on the
scaffold, the detailed despatches sent by the
French Ambassador in London to Louis XIV.
in Paris, the Memoirs of the age, and the im-
partial conclusions of history, based on what is
described by Macaulay as " the strongest evi-
dence by which the fact of a death was ever
verified."

. But let Saint-Foix not be dismissed too
coldly from us. We owe him, at least, a
"homage of amaze." The callous invention
of Voltaire, the light deceit of Soulavie, were

9*

132 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

certain of a hearing, and they have had it for
an age; but we are dumbly to praise the forlorn
pugnacity of this ex-officer of cavalry, ready
and eager to pink the critic who would not
be persuaded that a barber's assistant had
identified Monmouth through the folds of a
towel tied over his face. For the purposes of
fiction, by the way, this was a stronger story
than the legend of the twin brother : it attaches
itself to the fancy — on the one hand, an
English peasantry fondly believing in the
second coming of an idolised prince ; on the
other hand, the victim of Sedgemoor following
Saint-Mars from one French dungeon to an-
other, and, after missing a throne and escaping
a scaffold, buried in the murk of a November
twilight by two turnkeys of the Bastille.*

On the evening of Monday, 13th of July,
Monmouth knew that he was to die on Wed-
nesday morning. Clarendon, Keeper of the

* Topin.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 133

Privy Seal, had visited him in the Tower, and
had assured him that no hope remained. Two
bishops came next, Turner of Ely and Ken of
Bath and Wells, u with a solemn message from
the King." Monmouth, bloodless and terror-
stricken, could not be brought to resign
himself. If no pardon, might not a respite be
obtained ? The prelates, more anxious at this
crisis for his ghostly than for his physical wel-
fare, exhorted him vainly ; and were greatly
scandalised by Monmouth's heretical plea of
the propriety, " in the sight of God," of his
relations with his mistress, Lady Wentworth.
They left him, after adjuring him to spend the
night in prayer for spiritual enlightenment.

Tuesday came and passed, bringing neither
pardon nor respite ; and Monmouth's last day
began. At an early hour he parted from his
wife and children ; showing, it is said, kindness
but no emotion : he had sunk from terror to a
dull despair. Lady Wentworth, who, in a few

i 3 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

short months, was to follow her lover to the
grave, did not see him.

The hour of ten brought the coach of the
lieutenant of the Tower; and now, with Death's
hand upon him, Monmouth grew calm and
dignified. At his request, the divines who had
visited him in the Tower went with him to the
scaffold, and continued to exhort him to the
last : — " God accept your repentance ! God
accept your imperfect repentance ! "*

Mournful faces thronged about the scaffold,
and Tower Hill was " covered up to the
chimney tops with an innumerable multitude
of gazers," weeping, or silently indignant.
Monmouth, as he passed between the ranks of
the guards, saluted them with a smile ; and he
mounted the scaffold without a tremor. The
crowd hungered for his words, but he said very
little, protesting that he died " a Protestant of
the Church of England." The bishops broke

* Macaulay.

The Execution of Monmouth on Tower Hill.
From a German Broadsheet.

THE EXPIATION OF MONMOUTH. 137

in upon this, saying that as a member of that
church he must submit himself to his King,
and acknowledge the sinfulness of his rebellion.
Once again the prelates interfered, when Mon-
mouth would have spoken of Lady Wentworth.
He declared his sorrow for the sufferings he
had brought upon his followers ; then the
bishops "prayed with him long and fervently,' ,
and Monmouth, after a troubled pause, added
a slow " Amen " to the closing prayer for the
King. Entreated to speak to the soldiers, " I
will make no speeches," he exclaimed ; and
addressed himself forthwith to the executioner,
to whom he gave six guineas, with injunctions
to despatch him swiftly, and not to hack him
"as you did my Lord Russell." But this com-
mand, and possibly also the long and painful
scene he had been witness of, and the con-
sciousness that the people loathed him for the
dreadful work he had to do, unnerved the
headsman utterly. Again and again the axe

i 3 8 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

fell on Monmouth ; the wretched Ketch flung
it from him, took it up again at the sheriffs
command, and finally severed the head from
the shoulders with a knife,* amid screams of
rage and horror from the crowd.

The vengeance of the relentless James,
which history, nevertheless, cannot severely
reproach, was satisfied. Monmouth's head and
body were gathered up, and buried privately
the same day under the communion table of
St. Peters Chapel in the Tower of London.
An abstract of his speech on the scaffold,
published by his partisans, has been rejected
as spurious.

*He "severed not his head from his body till he cut it off with a
knife." — Verney MSS.

139

CHAPTER VI.

Between the years 1754 and 1789,

"The King

of the three writers in succession espoused
Markets." ^ cause G f the Due de Beaufort
as a candidate for the mask. At the
respected age of eighty (for he was born
in 1674), the abbe Lenglet-Dufresnoy * first
advanced this curious opinion, in his Plan de
r histoire generate et particuliere de la monarchie
franfoise, a treatise in three volumes i2mo,
published in 1754.

*The abbe, an ingenious student, had had the philosopher's full share
of imprisonment under the absolute monarchy, for he was twice con-
fined in the Dungeon of Vincennes and six times in the Bastille. It
was, in the eighteenth century especially, an approved method of
recognising distinction in letters ; and the abbe did not complain. Far
from it ; he always obeyed his summons with the greatest alacrity,
declaring that prison was the best place in the world to work in ;
packed a few clean shirts and his MSS., and rode off with the officer
who had come for him.

i 4 o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

The systeme Beaufort seems to have been the
especial snare of age, for Lagrange-Chancel,* of
the Philippiques, carried fourscore years and
three, when, in 1759, in an article in Freron's
Annee litteraire, he defended Lenglet-Du-
fresnoy.

The historian Anquetil was nearing the
seventies when he lent his support to the same
theory in his Louis XIV., sa Cour et le Regent,

1789.

Since the year of the Revolution, Beaufort's
claim has gone undefended. It shall engage us
very briefly.

Topin has noted the slight comparison that
may be established between Beaufort and
Monmouth. Both were royal princes, of
illegitimate origin ; both had a career of ad-
venture ; and both enjoyed the uncommon
privilege of being fatuously loved by the people.

* The satirist's experience of dungeons was inferior to the abbe's
but he had been a prisoner of Sainte- Marguerite.

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 141

During many years, the market people of Paris
refused as obstinately to believe in the death of
Beaufort as did the peasants of the west of
England in the death of Monmouth.* Ten
years after the siege of Candia, where Beaufort
unquestionably lost his life, the women of the
markets were still having masses said, not for
the repose of his soul, but for the prompt return
of the man himself, f These persistent doubts,
which, passing lightly over the necessity of
proof, are always so easily propagated, have
sufficed to place Beaufort at one era and
Monmouth at another under the mask of
Saint-Mars's perplexing prisoner. The points

* These superstitions of the people are not peculiar to any age or
country. The death of Mr. Charles Stuart Parnell is, I should sup-
pose, pretty well attested ; yet there are those in Ireland who declare
that the lost leader lives and will re-appear. Nay, by some it is
maintained that he has re-appeared — and in a character somewhat
plaguing to our fighting-men. Has he not been identified in print
with that elusive De Wet of the Boer War who (at the time of
writing) is leading our Generals such a dance among the mountains
and passes of South Africa !

t Topin !

142 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

of resemblance cease here : the characters of
the two men were totally dissimilar.

Monmouth breathed the air of Courts as a
prince should do. Beaufort, not less a prince, •
floundered like a clown in the royal circle — the
Tony Lumpkin of Versailles. Grandson of
Henri IV. and Gabrielle d'Estrees (his father
was Cesar de Vendome), Beaufort came up
from the country to the Court, a raw, handsome
braggart, with one hand incessantly on his hip,
and the other twirling up his moustaches ; his
conversation a ludicrous failure to mix the slang
of the stable and the hunting-field, which was
his proper language, with the jargon of the
elegants, which was exotic to him. He got so
far as to introduce a vocabulary of his own,
which had no imitators, and which Cardinal de
Retz declared would have melted Cato into tears.
But the stentorian, lubberly Duke had his
revenge at the wars, where his idiosyncrasies
were " not noticed in him " ; and he returned

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 143

from Arras with a reputation for prowess in the
field which rallied around him the courtiers by
whom he had before been flouted.

Indeed, he was presently in the way to
become a strong man in the kingdom ; for, on
the eve of the death of Louis XIII., we find
Anne of Austria desirous of making him the
guardian of her son, as " the most honest man
in France." It was not a sagacious choice, for
"the most honest man" was in truth one of the
vainest, most unstable, and most incompetent.
In no long time he is observed talking very
loudly in the rebellious ranks of the Fronde,
leader of the ridiculous party whose preten-
sions obtained for them the nickname of Les
Importants. A truculent, inglorious figure in
the Fronde, he gave trouble enough to Mazarin
to make it worth the minister's while to arrest
him ; he was confined for a time in the State
prison of Vincennes, and the Importants were
dispersed.

144 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

But Beaufort, for all his ambition, had no
singleness or fixity of purpose ; he severed the
ties of party as easily as he formed them, and
the Fronde knew him no more. After a
period of idle opposition to the young king, he
was sent into banishment ; and returned to be
reconciled to his old enemy, Mazarin. At no
time was Beaufort a political adversary to be
very seriously reckoned with. He had no
real knowledge of affairs ; he could act violently
at any time, but with judgment at no time ; and,
wanting the ability to choose a course for
himself in politics, he was pushed into one
course and another by those whom he fancied
he was leading by the ear.

Outside the sphere of the populace of Paris
— indeed, it was narrower ; it was the sphere
of the markets — Beaufort did not possess the
slightest influence ; and his authority over these
people, whom he bullied and joked with in
their own argot, was much more that of a

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 145

popular hero than of a political leader. He
called the market people his subjects, and they
in return dubbed him their king : he was the
King of the Markets. The porters and fish-
wives followed him in the streets, proud beyond
measure of their debonnaire prince, who had
condescended to choose his town house in the
most populous quarter of Paris,* who would
mount on a stone to hold an argument, or show
off his strength in a public brawl.

On a sudden, however, the factious Beaufort
ranged himself and grew submissive. In 1663,
being then at the sane age of forty-seven, he
received an appointment as Admiral, in
succession to his father. Lagrange-Chancel
would have his readers believe that Beaufort
made use of this office to traverse the designs
of Colbert, controlling the navy ; but this proves
quite inexact. The opposition to the throne
was exhausted at this time ; the passions

* Rue Quincampoix.

IO

146 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

kindled during the Fronde were extinguished ;
submission to authority had become or was
becoming the policy of those princes and nobles
erstwhile the most restless and intractable.
" The Prince de Conti married the niece of
Mazarin ; the great Conde received from the
King with gratitude the Order of the Saint-
Esprit" ; and Beaufort, transformed into an
Admiral, grew mild and malleable. On the
quarter-deck, it is true, he swore and
swaggered as of old, and was quite the pirate
in the treatment of his officers, whom he was
for ever threatening to pitch into the sea ;
but in his naval expeditions he endured cheer-
fully and with docility the authority of the
expert whom Colbert had placed beside him. #
It was his subordinates only who felt the
natural violence of his character ; the Court
had nothing to fear from him. Far from
choosing even to pretend himself dangerous,

* Relation de Gigdiyfaite au Roi par M. de Gadagne, lieutenant-gdneral.

FRANCOIS DE VANDO,

Due de Beaufort Pair dcFv.uice.Poi

Francis de Vendome, " Roi des Halles.'
From a contemporary print.

"KING OF THE MARKETS:' 149

Beaufort had gone over, with characteristic
ostentation, to the side of the young King and
his advisers ; and had he pretended danger,
his gifts as a conspirator were too mediocre
to excite alarm. At his proudest and most
powerful, he was no more than the King of the
Markets — le Roi des Halles.

The hypothesis which lifts Beaufort to the
dignity of the Iron Mask rests on the
assumption that his popularity threatened the
safety of the State. He was given, in 1669,
the command of the expedition to Candia, to
the end, it was said, that he should return
no more. He did not, it was said, die at
Candia, as history has affirmed : from the
midst of the fleet, and in the presence of the
army, he was adroitly whisked away, and
conveyed into the keeping of Saint- Mars, at
Sainte-Marguerite. This is the story as we
have it from Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Lagrange-
Chancel, and Anquetil — three savants who

VSo THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

took the field at an age not usually nimble
in critical speculation or research. If, however,
the facts brought forward as to Beaufort's
popularity (considered as a source of danger to
the State) possess any value, Louis XIV., it
is clear, had not a reason in the world for
ridding himself of the Duke. But Beaufort
did certainly disappear at the siege of Candia.
Was he killed there, or was he carried thence
into captivity ? We have no proof whatever
that he was carried away. Have we, then, the
proofs of his death ?

On the 5th of June, 1669, the expedition
for the relief of Candia, besieged by the
Turks, set out from Toulon, with Beaufort
in command ; and on the morning of the
19th the western point of the island was
sighted. In the evening, under cover of
darkness, Beaufort, with Navailles (general
of the 7,000 French troops who had sailed
with the fleet), made for the shore

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 151

with muffled oars, and succeeded in reach-
ing the port. They soon convinced them-
selves of the desperate condition of the
Venetian defenders of the place. In fact,
of the 14,000 whom the ambassador of the
Venetian Republic had reported to be within
the walls, there were not above 6,000 who
could be relied upon as combatants ; and
most of these had lost heart during a defence
which was now regarded as hopeless.

A council of war was held on the 20th,
when Beaufort, Navailles, the Captain-General
of the Venetians, and the other officers who
took part in it, were unanimously agreed
that a resolute sortie offered the sole pros-
pect of success. The final plan of this was
settled on the evening of the 24th, and its
execution resolved upon for midnight of the
25th. By that hour, the whole of the
French troops had been safely brought on
shore. The one hope lay in taking com-

152 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

pletely by surprise the swarming legions of
the Turks. The troops of the Venetians,
useless at present within their bastions, were
not advised of the project of attack until
one o'clock on the morning of the 26th,
when, roused from sleep by their officers,
they were hurried in silence to their posts.

The French foot were marshalled on the
esplanade, where as the hour of two sounded
from the church of Saint-Marc, they were
joined by two hundred of the King's
musketeers and five companies of cavalry.
Navailles and his men moved off towards
the right, Beaufort directing his march
upon the left : the two corps were to re-unite
at a signal given by Navailles. Arrived
within a little space of the enemy, Beaufort
made his troops lie down ; while Navailles,
who had a larger distance to cover, con-
tinued his stealthy advance. Some fifty
minutes before the dawn, the drums of the

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 153

Turks startled the silence ; but a few of
Beaufort's marines, creeping up to the camp, '
returned to say that the enemy were merely
beating the reveille, and were still in total
ignorance of their danger

Navailles had got unimpeded to the ex-
treme right, where he halted until his reserve
and the rear guard had come up. Beaufort,
with growing impatience, was waiting for
the signal, when, suddenly, a roar of mus-
ketry burst from the distant right, and the
red fire glowed over the camp of the Turks.
In an instant, Beaufort was on his feet, his
men with him ; the charge was sounded ; and,
while the day had not yet dawned, the troops
leaped blindly to the assault. The Turkish en-
trenchments were almost immediately stormed ;
the Turks, panic-stricken, fired off their pieces
and fled, many casting themselves headlong
into the sea. It seemed as though victory were
already with the French ; but just then a vast

154 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

sheet of flame reared itself into the night, and
a terrifying explosion shook the field. Beau-
fort's troops and , marines, not knowing what
had happened, halted in alarm ; and scarcely
obeyed the rallying voice of their leader.

Far other were the effects which that
catastrophe had produced among the soldiers
of Dampierre, who headed the detachment
commanded by Navailles. A magazine con-
taining twenty-five thousand-weight of powder
had exploded, swallowing an entire battalion
of the French guards, and spreading panic
on every side. The troops, persuaded that
the whole field was sown with mines, threw
away their arms, and ran in all direc-
tions. In the semi-darkness of that hour
'twixt night and morning, Beaufort's marines,
meeting the flying troops of Dampierre and
Navailles, fell on them as foes ; and an indis-
criminate and indescribable slaughter began.
In vain did Beaufort, himself abandoned,

"KING OF THE MARKETS." 155

essay to undo that fatal error. Covered with
blood, his horse wounded, he threw himself
amid the terrified Frenchmen, crying: "A moi,
mes enfants ! Je suis votre amiral. Ralliez-
vous pres de moi ! " Brave, but futile effort I
The dawn was growing, and the Turks realised
that they were not pursued. Recovering their
ranks as quickly as they had broken them
they became in their turn the assailants ; and,
shouting the Prophet's name, they chased the
French to the gates of Candia.

Under shelter of the ramparts, the French
took a breathing space, and roughly summed
their losses. Beaufort was missing. His
death was considered certain by the army.
He had been seen last, streaked with blood,
and galloping on a wounded horse through
that dense melee in which Frenchmen were
killing Frenchmen as Turks. Any French-
man who died obscurely on that half-lighted
field might easily have been posed by his

156 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

partisans as the hero of a mystery. But
no one raises a hint of foul play in the case
of Beaufort. The first despatch that reaches
Colbert, from his brother Colbert de
Maulevrier, signalises Beaufort's death as the
most deplorable result of the battle.* And
the army was not satisfied with the know-
ledge that the leader of the expedition
was missing. Was it possible the Turks
had taken him ? A white flag was sent
into the Turkish lines, but Beaufort was not
among the prisoners. It was then held for
certain that he had fallen, an easy mark
on horseback, among the lost files of the
French whose death was never questioned ;
and not a hint or a line that has come
down to posterity has disturbed this belief.

The dates alone should suffice to dis-
prove the case of Lenglet-Dufresnoy and

* Manuscrits de la Bibliotheque impe'riale, papiers Colbert : cited by
Topin.

"KING OF THE MARKETS:' 157

his two adherents. Was the Man in the
Mask a nonagenarian ? Beaufort was born
in 16 1 6, and the prisoner of Saint-Mars
died in the Bastille in 1703. And how
does Saint-Mars receive Beaufort a prisoner
at Sainte-Marguerite in 1669 — eighteen years
before he goes to that fortress ?

'58

CHAPTER VII.

Endless indeed has been the per-

The Tragedy

of Nicolas verse ingenuity of writers on the
pouquet. su bject of the Iron Mask. That
Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV.'s overweening
Superintendent of Finance, died at Pignerol,
March 23, 1680, is an historical fact which
does not admit of question or of doubt ;
yet Paul Lacroix (the bibliophile Jacob, a
voluminous and entertaining author), not con-
tent with the nineteen years of captivity
which fate decreed the afflicted Surintendant,
sentenced him to twenty-three more as the
Man in the Iron Mask.

Not that this folly was quite original with
the bibliophile. It glimmered first in an

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 159

article published, in 1789, in a journal called
Loisirs dun patriot* frangais ; I republished
afterwards as a pamphlet, and sold to a
confiding public under the title, V Homme au
masque de fer, dcvoile dapres une note
trouvee dans les papiers de la Bastille. The
remarkable " note found among the papers
of the Bastille " has long gone to keep com-
pany with the legend of the silver plate
and the linen shirt ; for neither Paul Lacroix
nor anyone else succeeded in proving its
existence, and the bibliophile prudently
abstains from giving it a place of honour
among his documents. Here it is, for the
entertainment of the curious : — Fouquet,
arriving from the Isles of Saint e- Marguerite
in an iron mask. The note carried the
good round number, 64,389,000, and a double
signature — the letters XXX superposed
on the name Kersadiou. The author of the
jest elected to remain in an obscurity which

160 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

is and always has been destitute of interest.
The erudition and inexhaustible versatility of
Lacroix, from whose pen we have a little
library of volumes on the curiosities of French
history, were idly and unworthily employed in
reviving, in i84o, # a fable which had died in
the hour of its birth, sixty years earlier.

The downfall, degradation, punishment, and
death of Fouquet make an episode as striking
and poignant as any in the reign of Louis XIV.
He was at his height of power, the most daz-
zling figure at the Court, just when the King, at
the age of twenty-three, had resolved to rule
France alone. At the first Council he held
after the death of Mazarin, Louis had said :
" I shall be my own Prime Minister in
future " ; f and the Court, incredulous at first,
soon realised that the King meant to keep
his word. Already devoted to pleasure and

* V Homme an masque defer. (Paris, Mayen, 1840, in 8vo).
t "y<? serai a Vavenir mou premier ministre.''''

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 161

the chase, he began now to show himself

energetic and vigorous in affairs ; and from

this time forward, during the ensuing fifty

years, he devoted five hours a day to the

business of the State. So long as Fouquet

was indispensable, Louis retained him in his

post ; and that over-confident, rash minister

promised himself the Chancellorship and the

real government of France. But, though he

would not see it, and was deaf to the warnings

that reached him, Fouquet was very soon

upon the brink of ruin. The fortune he had

amassed out of the taxes was probably at

this time the most considerable in France.

Colbert, however (Fouquet's arch enemy),

conveyed to the King the secret of a hoard of

nearly eighteen millions of ready money, left

by Mazarin. Search was made and the money

found ; and Louis, independent of Fouquet

from that moment, resolved forthwith upon his

overthrow. Along with the King's incense-

ii

1 62 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

ment went a certain fear of the dazzling and
fascinating minister, who was capable, as Louis
imagined, of impeding if not of thwarting his
schemes for the government of France after his
own manner. During a summer of splendid
fetes at Fontainebleau, to which the opulence
of Fouquet contributed, the plot against him
was elaborated by Louis, whose natural gift
of dissimulation had ripened under Mazarin's
tuition. Had Fouquet been merely Superin-
tendent of Finance, he could have been
attacked and destroyed at once ; but as
Procureur- General he enjoyed the protection
of the Parlement. The King and Colbert
had recourse to a stratagem to induce him
to resign his office of Procureur-General ;
he did so, or rather he sold the office ; and
Louis exclaimed exultingly : " Tout va bien ;
il s'enterre de lui-meme ! " * Stripped of the
shield of the Parlement, Fouquet was at the

* " Good ! He's digging his own grave."

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 163

King's mercy, and on the 5th of September,
1 66 1, the blow fell. He was arrested in the
Place de la Cathedrale at Nantes, whither Louis
had gone to meet the Estates of Brittany.

11 The formation of a special court to try
him, the length of his trial, which lasted three
years, the obvious falseness of most of the
charges, the influence exercised by Louis over
the judges, the courage and ability shown by
the prisoner, his intimate relations with all
the ablest men of the day, his numerous and
varied interests, all combined to focus the
interest and the sympathy of France upon
Nicolas Fouquet." *

Sympathy rose higher when it became
evident that Louis had determined to ob-
tain a conviction at any cost. It was "a
seventeenth-century Warren Hastings trial."
Fouquet was accused of " corruption and
dishonesty in the management of the finances,

* Hassan's "Louis XIV."

II*

1 64 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

of appropriating to himself public money, of
preparing to revive civil war in France, and
for that purpose of fortifying Belle-isle." The
accusation of treason was ridiculous, but the
charges of malversation were easily estab-
lished. The truth is that, with rare intervals
of sound administration, the financial system
was rotten and immoral throughout the whole
period of the monarchy, and later. Mazarin
might have been impeached on this count as
justly as Fouquet, who was not more un-
scrupulous than the majority of his contem-
poraries in the handling of public money. But
Fouquet fell, as Louis intended he should
fall. Nor was it enough for Louis to have
broken and dishonoured him : the King's
treatment of the sentence decreed by the
judges was an anticipation of the chastisement
with which, eighteen years later, he was to
visit the Iron Mask. The judges were in
favour of banishment ; but the young sove-

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 165

reign, just entering upon the splendid heritage
of France, holding in his hands a power
tremendous enough to inspire generosity, and
at an age when the hey-day in the blood
should cry pity upon all misfortune, deliberately
changed the sentence into one of perpetual
imprisonment. Fouquet the magnificent,
whose lordly motto had been, Quo non
Ascendam ! Whither may I not ?7tount !
sank into the shades of a dungeon. Once
lodged in Pignerol, he never quitted it.

The system of Lacroix rests almost entirely
on the assumption — a perfectly gratuitous one
— that Fouquet's death at Pignerol was
simulated. Thus, after leaving his victim in
prison for nearly twenty years, and after
having, towards the close of that period,
eased his bonds considerably, Louis, for some
cryptic reason which history has not pene-
trated to this day, suddenly gives him out
as dead, separates him from the rest of the

166 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

world, binds a mask over his features, and
holds him in this double captivity twenty-
three years longer. The death of Fouquet
in 1680, says Lacroix, " is far from being
certain." Let us see.

And first it is to be observed that the
captivity of Fouquet was for many years an
extremely rigorous one. He endured it with
great fortitude, spending much time in the
study of works of devotion, and committing
his thoughts to paper when he could get
leave to write. Between the years 1665 and
1672, says Topin, all communication with
the outer world was forbidden him ; he
might not even send a message to his family.
All at once the King begins to soften a little.
At first, in 1672, a rare letter is permitted;
then a more regular correspondence, and
freedom of intercourse with other captives
and inmates of the fortress ; finally, there is
the visit and prolonged stay at Pignerol of

Nicolas Fouquet.
From an engraving by C. Mel Ian.

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 169

certain members of Fouquet's family. The
despatches are open.

On the 20th of January, 1679, the minister
Louvois wrote to Saint- Mars : —

" His Majesty is quite willing [trouve bon]
that M. Fouquet and M. de Lauzun * should
see each other as often as they please. They
may, if they choose, pass the day together,
and take their meals together. You are at
liberty to join them. They may have leave
to exercise at all times, not only within the
limits of the dungeon, but in any part of the
citadel. You can take them to dine with
Madame de Saint- Mars as often as you like,
even when strangers or officers of the town
are present . . . . His Majesty accords
permission to the officers of the citadel to
visit your prisoners and pass the morning

* De Lauzun, a captain in the King's guards, the hero of many
extraordinary adventures, and one of the most impudent little cox-
combs in France, was ten years in prison at Pignerol. He had already
had a taste of the Bastille, for an insolent speech to Louis XIV.

170 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

or afternoon with them, should they wish it,
one of your own officers being present.

With regard to the governor

and residents of the town, you will act as you
think proper in respect of visits to be paid
by them."

Still more important and explicit is the
minister's letter of the ioth of May: —

" The King, having granted permission to
Madame Fouquet, her children, and M.
Fouquet of Mezieres,* to visit M. Fouquet
at Pignerol, I have his Majesty's command to
advise you of the same, and further to inform
you that Madame Fouquet is to have the
fullest liberty of intercourse with her husband,
and even, should she desire it, to take up her
residence in M. Fouquet's apartment. As
regards the children and M. Fouquet's
brother, his Majesty desires that they may
be with him as much as they please, without

* Fouquet's brother.

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 171

the presence of any of your officers. The
same liberty is to be accorded to Salvert,
Madame Fouquet's man of business. You
may give leave also to the senior officers of
the town garrison and of the citadel to visit
your prisoners."

In the month of June, Louvois authorises
the visit of certain " dames de qualite "
of Turin. In November he permits another
brother of Fouquet to take up his residence
at Pignerol for twenty-four months, and to see
the prisoner " as often as he pleases during
that period."

Lastly, on the 18th of December, Fouquet's
daughter has leave to lodge in the dungeon
itself, in a chamber divided only by the dis-
tance of a single step from her father's.

And it is in these circumstances, in the
immediate presence of a numerous family —
under the very eyes, we may say, of a wife,
a son, a daughter, and two brothers — with

172 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Madame's man of affairs at hand, with
officers and people of the town and garrison
coming and going as they list, that Paul
Lacroix has the temerity to speak of a
simulated death of Fouquet, the 23rd of March,
1680! The time was not exactly in joint for
a plot of that sort. Is it a schemer so astute
as Louis XIV. (at this date forty-two years of
age) who sends Fouquet's whole family to join
him at Pignerol, gives his wife leave to share
his chamber, lodges his daughter within a
brick of him, and throws the prisoner's doors
open to any visitors he may choose to
receive, at the precise hour when his Majesty
is planning to report him dead, and to thrust
him thereupon into greater secrecy than ever ?
It is childish. And for what reason, this
pretended death and this prolongation of
Fouquet's captivity by three-and-twenty years ?
The bibliophile whispers us of some secret of
State of which Fouquet is the dreaded pos-

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS BOUQUET, 173

sessor. So ! And this prisoner with the un-
speakable secret is suddenly given the liberty
of the citadel, he is set in the midst of his
family, he is suffered, nay almost invited,
to blab it in the ears of all the gossips of
Pignerol who may come and call on him and
stay to dinner just as often as he has a mind
to company ? M. Lacroix, this was rating
rather cheaply the intellects of Louis XIV. !

But the case against the bibliophile is not
quite finished. Other documents ©f State,
together with letters of the family, allow us
to follow Fouquet for a space after his death
from apoplexy on the 23rd of March, 1680.
Saint-Mars sent immediately to Louvois. The
family of Fouquet communicated the tidings
to their friends, and wrote to the minister
soliciting the King's permission to lay him
in their vault in Paris. Madame de Sevigne
writes to her daughter on the 3rd of April :
" Poor M. Fouquet is dead ; I am very

174 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

sorry." And on the 5th, " If I were in the
counsels of M. Fouquet's family, I would see
that they did not send his poor body on a
journey, as I hear they propose to do."
On the 6th of April, the Gazette de France
makes the following announcement : " We
learn from Pignerol that the sieur Fouquet
has died there from apoplexy."

On the 8th of the month Louvois replied
to Saint-Mars, to the effect that he had in-
formed the King of Fouquet's death, and that
the King wished Fouquet's chamber to be
prepared for Lauzun. His Majesty sends
no message of regret. On the same day
the Minister wrote to Fouquet's son, the
Comte de Vaux : —

" Monsieur, —

" I am in receipt of your letter
of the 29th of last month. I have spoken
to the King concerning the request of your

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 175

mother to remove the body of the late M.
Fouquet from Pignerol. Rest assured there
will be no difficulty about that ; his Majesty,
has given the necessary orders."

At the same time Saint-Mars received his
instructions : —

v" The King commands me to inform you
that his Majesty consents to your delivery
of the body of the late M. Fouquet to his
widow, to be transported whither it may
please her."

The family possessed a vault in the chapel
of Saint-Frangois de Sales, in the church of
the convent of the Dames de Sainte- Marie,
grande rue Saint-Antoine, Paris ; but it was
not until the 23rd of March of the year
following, 1 68 1, that the body of Fouquet
was carried and deposited there. In the
" registres mortuaires " of the church the
record may be read : —

176 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

" Le 23 Mars 1681, fut inhume dans
notre eglise, en la chapelle de Saint-Fran-
cois de Sales, messire Nicolas Foucquet, qui
fut eleve a tous les degres d'honneur de la
magistrature, conseiller au parlement, mattre
des requestres, procureur general, surintendant
de£ finances, et ministre d'Estat.''

Thus humbly, by leave of the King, whose
anger had undone and destroyed him, was
Fouquet the magnificent inurned in the
church of the Ladies of Saint Mary, along-
side the dust of his father.

The principal hypotheses — most of them,
as the reader has perceived, mere " springes
to catch woodcocks " — have now been sub-
mitted to analysis. Francois Ravaisson,
keeper of the Arsenal Library, whose task of
classifying the Archives of the Bastille has
since his death been continued by M.
Funck-Brentano, " believed for a moment "

TRAGEDY OF NICOLAS FOUQUET. 177

(says his successor) " that the celebrated
prisoner might have been the young Count
de Ke>oualze who had fought at Candia
under the orders of Admiral de Beaufort.
Ravaisson put forth his theory with much
hesitation, and as, in the sequel, he was him-
self led to abandon it, we need not dwell
any longer upon it."

M. Jules Loiseleur, in his charming series
of Problemes historiques (1867) argued with
force and brilliancy in behalf of a certain
" prisonnier mysterieux " arrested by Catinat
in 1 68 1. Marius Topin put Loiseleur out of
court and countenance " by discovering
Catinat in the very prisoner he was said to
have arrested ! "

General lung wrote a big and very in-
teresting book * in support of the claims
of one Louis de Oldendorf (known also as

* La Verite stir le Masque de Fer. (Les Empoisonneurs). Paris :
H. Plon, 1873.

12

178 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Lefroid, de Kiffenbach, and the Chevalier
des Armoises), a native of Lorraine, a spy
and poisoner, arrested March 29, 1673, in
connection with the celebrated " affaire des
poisons." lung's work casts a broad light
upon those " amazing poison-dramas " which
remained for years among the obscurest
problems of the reign of Louis XIV. ; but
in the endeavour to identify Oldendorf with
the Man in the Mask he failed completely.
As his opponent, M. Lair, at once observed
(and the point is emphasized by M. Funck-
Brentano), " General lung did not even suc-
ceed in proving that his nominee entered
Pignerol, an essential condition to his being
the Masque de Fer."

These records, then, may once again be
wiped from memory : Oblivion has looked
upon them all. We have still to pluck the
heart out of the mystery.

PART II.

THE MAN IN THE MASK.

i8i

CHAPTER I.

Had Louis XIV. maintained in

The Intrigue

for Italy the sagacious policy of Riche-
casaie. jj eu> there had never been a
Man in the Iron Mask !

Victorious in 1631, that great minister
in his prudence sacrificed most of the fruits
of his victory ; restored Piedmont and Savoy,
retaining only the stronghold of Pignerol,
whereby he held always open a gate of
northern Italy. To keep watch on Italy
without alarming her ; to protect the rights
of the small Italian princes, while not
menacing their independence ; to require of
them in return the fullest measure of con-
fidence ; to thwart the Spanish plots, and
suffer the Spaniards to draw upon them-

i8 2 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK,

selves all manner of Italian hatreds : in a
word, to preserve an attitude passive but
vigilant, firm but not threatening — such was
Richelieu's judicious policy towards Italy.

And to this policy Louis XIV. adhered,
until, at about middle age, great in the
reflected triumphs of his diplomats on the
one hand, and of his invincible troops on the
other, he looked upon himself, not without
reason, as Europe's arbiter. Before the
Treaty of Nimeguen had been signed in
1678, his ambitious fancy had o'erleaped the
Alps ; and in Louvois, his Minister of War,
he found a willing and impetuous supporter.
In Piedmont he possessed Pignerol, which,
sufficient in the eyes of Richelieu, no longer
contented Louis, who had imagined for him-
self a great role in Italy. He would have
done well to remember at this juncture that
his authority beyond the Alps had been
accepted in proportion as its aims had been

THE INTRIGUE FOR C A SALE. 183

disguised, and that there must come a change
in the sentiments of the Italians when it was
perceived that the moderate policy of Mazarin
and Richelieu was to be superseded by the
" military diplomacy " of Louvois.

Among the kinglets sharing the pleasant
territories of northern Italy at this era was
the young Charles IV., Duke of Mantua,
"the degenerate representative of that House
of Gonzaga from which had sprung so many
illustrious men, and which had allied itself
with some of the foremost families of
Europe." History depicts Charles as a rare
gambler, rake, and spendthrift ; an absentee
who seldom visited his little territory except
to wring money from it ; a leader in the
gaieties of Venice, where he was fast exhaust-
ing in extravagant adventures the remnants
of health and fortune. His revenues were
spent before they reached him, and he
was always in the hands of the Jews. In

i8 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

fine, the young Duke was on the point of
being up for sale — and Louis XIV. was not
unwilling to become his purchaser.

Separated from Mantua by the fair
extent of the great plain of Lombardy was
the Marquisate of Montferrat, a fertile and
coveted tract which had been annexed
to the Duchy of Charles IV. Of this region
the capital was Casale, a fortified place,
swept by the Po, and lying some fifteen
leagues to the east of Turin. The district
is rugged, and at this day almost untravelled,
but Charlemagne had planted here an out-
post of his empire. The walls of Casale
" are still formidable, though the children
race up and down their approaches unterri-
fied ; and the castle and the citadel still re-
echo to the clash of arms, as they have done
for more than a thousand years. . .
Palaces, too, may be found, if one care to
look for them, and — best of all — broad shady

Louis XIV.
From an engraving after Fiter.

THE INTRIGUE FOR CASALE. 187

walks by the ancient bastions." * This
Casale was a place of great strategical im-
portance, above all for Piedmont : Turin had
always eagerly desired it. That the Duke of
Mantua, given over to his pleasures, should
possess a footing in this neighbour-territory of
Piedmont, mattered little to anybody : but that
the King of France should establish himself
there — this would be a serious concern for
Turin. He was already master of Pignerol,
and if the reader will glance at a map of
northern Italy he will see at once that, master
of Casale also, Louis would hold the Govern
ment of Turin between two redoubtable fort
resses. From Pignerol in the south-west,
the passage of the Alps lay open to him ;
at Casale in the north-east, he would stand
upon the high road to Milan. And Casale
was the object of the intrigue " mysteriously
begun in 1676."

* Justin H. Smith, "The Troubadours at Home," Vol. i.

188 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

The minister of Louis at the capital of the
Venetian Republic was the Abbe d'Estrades ;
an able, restless, scheming man ; eager to
commend himself to his master by some suc-
cessful stroke of diplomacy.* No sooner was
d'Estrades aware that Louvois had put
Casale into the mind of Louis, than he
began forthwith to make the project his
own. Casale must be ceded to Louis, and
d'Estrades was the man to contrive it. He
knew how Charles of Mantua stood, how
overpowering was his need of money, and
how beggared his resources : he knew the
character of Charles. The situation seemed
as fortunate as fortunate could be.

Further, it was well known to the Abbe
that Charles was greatly in the hands of his

* "The Abbe d'Estrades, Ambassador for a considerable time
from Lewis the Fourteenth to the Republic of Venice, was son of
Godfrey, Count d'Estrades, so long employed in negotiations and
embassies in Holland, and who was one of the eight Marshals of
France made upon the death of Turenne. Madame Cornuel called
them ' La Monnoie de M. de Turenne.' " — Ellis.

THE INTRIGUE FOR CAS ALE. 189

favourites ; that the affairs of Mantua were
more or less administered by them ; that
Charles — so long as he were left to his
gamesters, his women, and his wine-parties —
was very prone to take their counsel in all
things. Through one of these persons the
young Duke might be approached.

High among the favourites of Charles was
Ercole Antonio Mattioli. Born at Bologna,
the 1 st of December, 1640, Mattioli, a fore-
most figure in Mantuan society, belonged to
an ancient and distinguished family of lawyers.
His grandfather, Costantino Mattioli, had
risen to the rank of senator ; and one of his
uncles, Hercule or Ercole Mattioli, a Jesuit
father, was a noted orator. At the age of
nineteen Ercole Antonio himself was a prize-
man in civil and canonical law, and a little
later he held a chair in the University of
Bologna. Topin describes him as having
won some repute in authorship. Having

19© THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

allied himself by marriage with a senatorial
family of his native town, Mattioli settled in
Mantua, where his talents and his graces
won him the patronage and support of
Charles III., by whom he was ultimately
appointed Secretary of State. The son and
successor of Charles III. favoured him not
less, and in this reign Mattioli was created
Supernumerary Senator of Mantua, a dignity
which carried with it the title of Count.
" When he ceased to be Secretary of State,"
says Ellis, "does not appear; but he was
clearly not in that office when he first, un-
happily for himself, was involved in diplo-
matic relations with the agents of the French
Government." What is certain is that, al-
though not at this date Secretary of State,
Mattioli was wholly in the Duke's good
graces, his companion in affairs of pleasure,
and a counsellor in politics when Charles was
minded to be serious.

THE INTRIGUE FOR CAS ALE. 191

Him the Abbe cTEstrades resolved to
sound upon the affair of Casale. But before
putting himself in direct communication with
Mattioli, d'Estrades despatched to him one
Giuliani, a roving Italian newsman, who
tripped from town to town seeking things
to publish in a sheet of which he was the
editor. " A little editor of newspapers, in
whose shop the letters of news are written,"
is the description given of him in a despatch
from Venice to the minister Pomponne.
Faring hither and thither on his proper
business — Turin, Milan, Verona, Mantua,
Venice — Giuliani was the man who could be
used as a go-between, and no suspicion
raised as to his movements. D'Estrades
sent him to parley with Mattioli at Verona ;
and this was the first real move in the
game.

192

CHAPTER II.

It is begun in the strictest secrecy.
The Ripening Qn fa French side they were

Plot.

well aware that the occupation of
Casale by troops of Louis XIV. could cer-
tainly make little for the permanent welfare
of Italy, while the advisers of Charles IV.
were quite alive to the necessity of keeping
the affair from the eyes and ears of the
Spanish party intriguing in the Court
of Mantua. They were opponents to be
reckoned with. Charles's mother, Isabella
Clara of Austria, who headed his council,
and who was the real ruler in Mantua, was
entirely pledged to the Spanish interests, as
opposed to those of France.

The situation is lucidly set out in the first

THE RIPENING PIOT. 193

long despatch of d'Estrades to Louis XIV.,
dated from Venice, December 18th, 1677.*
D'Estrades had satisfied himself that Charles
possessed " more talent and ambition than
he was thought to have " ; that he would gladly
get back the authority which had slipped
into his mother's hands ; and that he had a
rooted distrust of the Spaniards, who, as he
believed, aimed at securing for themselves
Casale and the whole Montferrat. These
were the facts which gave d'Estrades to
believe that the Duke would be not unwilling
to place himself to some extent under the pro-
tection of the French King. The despatch goes
on to show why Mattioli had been selected as
the agent to approach the Duke, and Giuliani
as the agent to approach Mattioli.

" I have thought," writes d'Estrades to
Louis, " that I could not employ anyone in

* We issue here upon that remarkable series of papers which Delort
was the first to overhaul in the Foreign Office at Paris, and in which
he found the beginnings of the true history of the Iron Mask.

13

i 9 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

this affair more proper to conduct it than a
certain Count Mattioli, who is entirely devoted
to that prince. I had known him for some
time, and he had shown a great desire to
render himself agreeable to your Majesty by
some service. I knew that he had been
Secretary of State to the late Duke of
Mantua ; that the reigning duke had preserved
much affection for him, and that he was well
informed as to the different interests of the
Princes of Italy. As, however, he had been
much in the Milanese, and had had access to
the Spanish ministers, I resolved not to place
any confidence in him till I had put him to the
proof. I accordingly charged the Giuliani to
whom your Majesty was good enough to send
a reward six months ago, and whose zeal for
your service forbids all doubt of his fidelity,
to observe Mattioli attentively, and in secret.
Having been sufficiently informed of his ex-
treme discontent with the Spaniards, who,

THE RIPENING PLOT. 195

after entertaining him with hopes, had always
in the end abandoned him, I sent Giuliani, in
the month of last October, to Verona, where
he went under pretext of his private affairs."

We may return to that month, and overhear
the first overtures of Giuliani in an affair
which was to bring about results terrible
enough for Mattioli. Giuliani had been
well primed by the abbe, and shows for his
own part an emphatic interest in his mission.
As d'Estrades had instructed him, he repre-
sented to Mattioli that the friends of the
Duke desired greatly to see him in a position
of independence ; that all his territories and
all his revenues were under the absolute
control of his mother and the monk Bulgarini,
her confessor, and that Casale and the Mont-
ferrat were threatened by all manner of
Spanish and other intrigues.

To these hints Mattioli lent an open and
a friendly ear. "He had long, with grief,

13*

196 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

seen the truth " of what Giuliani had laid
before him, he said, but " there was still a
remedy for so great an evil," and he would,
with Monsieur 1' Abbe's approval, get speech
of the Duke and "discover his real sentiments."
All this was duly conveyed by Giuliani to
d'Estrades, and by d'Estrades to Louis XIV.

Next we are apprised of the " secret in-
terview " which Mattioli had with Mantua,
and then of the meeting between that prince
and Giuliani. The Duke, says d'Estrades,
" approved very much of the proposition that
was made him, to free him from the perpetual
uneasiness he felt on the score of the
Spaniards, and that, for this purpose, Casale
should be placed in your Majesty's hands,
upon the understanding that I should try
to obtain from you in his favour all that
he could reasonably ask for."

The Duke desired to communicate the
matter to two of his counsellors, " in whom

THE RIPENING PLOT. 197

he had the most confidence," and he gave
the selection of them to Mattioli. Mattioli
named the Marquis Cavriani and Joseph
Varano, " in whom he has confidence." The
affair, it is evident, was already in a good
train ; already there was talk of the preparation
of " a draft of the plan." D'Estrades was
now anxious for a personal interview with
the Duke, and this, it was agreed, should be '
managed at Venice in Carnival time, when
all the world, " even the Doge and the oldest
senators," went masked. What the Duke de-
sired above everything was that Louis should
send into Italy a sufficiently strong army " to
be able to undertake something considerable,"
— an army of which he wanted the general-
ship, says d'Estrades, " in order to be con-
sidered in Italy like the late Duke of Modena,
and the late Duke of Mantua, who at his age
commanded in chief the Emperor's army, with
the title of Vicar-General of the Empire."

198 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Enclosed with d'Estrades's despatch was a
letter from Mattioli to Louis,* in which he
protests his devotion to him and to the
interests of France. " For myself, I bless
the destiny which procures me the honour
of serving so great a monarch, whom I
regard and revere as a demi-god." He
undertakes to "transmit to your Majesty all
that I shall learn respecting Casale, which
has been fortified by one of the most skilful
engineers of the Milanese." He entices the
King with a hint of the great strength of
the place. " I am convinced it would be
useless in me to enlarge upon the importance
of the fortress of Casale. Your Majesty
must remember that at different times it has
arrested the progress of many armies, and
that it is the only bulwark upon which
depends the loss or the preservation to the
Spaniards of the territories of Milan ; terri-

* December 14th, 1677.

THE RIPENING PLOT. 199

tories which, for more reasons than one,
ought to belong to your Majesty's crown."

To this Louis replies with his own hand,
on the 1 2th of January, 1678 : —

" I have seen from the letter you wrote
me, as well as from what has been com-
municated to me by my Ambassador, the
Abbe d'Estrades, the affection you exhibit
for my interests. You cannot doubt that
I am greatly obliged to you, and that I shall
have much pleasure in giving you proofs
of my satisfaction upon every occasion."

On the 24th of December, 1677, and on
the 1st of January, 1678, we have despatches
of d'Estrades to the minister Pomponne.*
The Abbe has learned from the Duke of

* " Simon Arnaud de Pomponne, Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs from 1 67 1 to 1679, when he was dismissed from his office, but
retained the title of Minister of State, with permission to attend the
Council. A man, like so many of his race, who united considerable
talents to great excellence of character. Madame de Sevigne says,
in speaking of the eminent station he had filled, that ' Fortune had
wished to make use of his virtues for the happiness of others.' " — Ellis.

200 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Mantua that, should the French enter Italy,
and should the Duke show a disposition to
favour them, the Austrian party have deter-
mined to seize Casale and all the Mont-
ferrat. Mantua also is to be occupied.
In these circumstances, the Duke, who is
" watched by his mother, by the monk
Bulgarini, who governs her, and by the
greater part of his ministers," can neither
declare himself openly on Louis's side, nor
deliver up Casale to him, " unless he will
send a sufficient army into Italy to secure
that fortress." Further, " the Emperor and
the Spaniards are ardently soliciting the
Nuncios and the Ambassadors from Venice,
residing at Madrid and Vienna, to persuade
their masters to unite with them against
France, and to represent to them that they
have a common interest in the preservation
of Italy, and in keeping out of it, the armies
with which it is menaced."

THE RIPENING PLOT. 201

On the 1 2th of January, Louis writes ex-
haustively to d'Estrades, commending his
zeal in the business, and flattering Charles
for the " noble resolutions he seems disposed
to take." As for the citadel and fortress
of Casale, should they be given up to him,
Louis says, " I shall willingly content myself
with holding them in the same manner in
which I held them formerly ; that is to say,
under the condition of preserving them for
the Duke of Mantua, and of paying the
garrisons I shall keep there. I would also,
in order to favour the military inclinations
of this Prince, take measures with him
respecting the command of the armies I
shall send across the Alps."

Louis objects, however, to the Duke's price
of one hundred thousand pistoles.* "You must
make him understand that this sum is too
large." As it was not convenient to Louis to

* About ^"40,000 ; the pistole being equal to ten francs.

202 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

send a considerable army into Italy that year,
d'Estrades is instructed to protract the negotia-
tions, and to " continue to entertain " the Duke
with the notion that the French troops would
shortly arrive in his territories.* Mattioli, as
the principal confidant in the affair, is to be
kept "always in good humour, by the assurance
of the especial good-will I bear him for his
conduct, and by the expectation of the proofs
of it which I shall be inclined to give him."

The main difficulty — indeed, almost the only
one— was to protract the negotiations, for*
everything was going so smoothly and so
rapidly that, as d'Estrades writes to Pomponne
on the 29th of January, there was no serious
hindrance to be found or created. It was in
the month of January that Mattioli began
secretly to visit the Abbe at his house in
Venice. The only point the Duke's agent
seemed inclined to contest was the price to be
paid for the occupation of Casale. At length,

THE RIPENING PLOT. 203

he proposed to d'Estrades a sum of 500,000
livres, about ,£20,000. This was reducing the
price by half, but d'Estrades was for a lower
figure still ; and, eventually Mattioli, knowing
his master's straits, was induced to accept an
offer of 100,000 crowns.

Taking the crown at a value of three francs
(though it is all but impossible to determine
the relative values of the moneys then in cir-
culation), this would represent the trifling sum
of £12,000. This, moreover, was to be paid
only on conditions. " Finally, Sire, I brought
him to content himself with one hundred
thousand crowns ; and that on condition that
your Majesty was not to pay them till after the
treaty had been signed ; and then, if you
choose not to give the whole sum at once, that
the Duke of Mantua should receive fifty
thousand crowns first, and the remaining fifty
thousand three months afterwards."

Everything else was agreed to " without

2o 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

difficulty." Duke Charles, in fine, was in a
hurry to conclude the affair ; being, says the
Abbe, "in continual terror of the design, which
he understands the Spaniards to have, of
seizing upon his fortresses on the least pretext,
and on the first favourable occasion."

The next step was to arrange the meeting
between Charles and d'Estrades, and nothing
hindered this but the extreme secrecy with
which the affair was being conducted. Charles
had come to Venice in the last days of January,
but the Spaniards were watching him, and it
was not until the 13th of March, 1678, that he
and the Abbe contrived their interview. We
see them encountering at midnight, closely
masked, " in a small open space," says
d'Estrades in his despatch to Louis, " which
is at an equal distance from his house and
mine. I was an entire hour with him." The
Duke was in a pressing haste to get the treaty
ratified, from the fear that he was in of being

THE RIPENING PLOT. 205

" overwhelmed by the Spaniards." Money,
money was his call : his supplies from the
Spaniards were threatening to stop, and,
lacking this support, he could not maintain the
garrison of Casale. His sole trust, he said,
was in France : When would Louis's troops
appear in Italy ? He was tired of the slowness
of despatches, and begged that Mattioli, in
whom, says d'Estrades, "he has a blind con-
fidence," might be sent to the French court,
where his presence "may bring matters to a
speedier issue."

D'Estrades was put to a shift. He knew
that Louis could not send in 1678 the army
upon which Mantua was counting. He knew
that the Duke, who was all for clinching the
treaty, began to be uneasy at the length of the
negotiations^ Balancing the issues, he decided
to let Mattioli go to Paris.

206

CHAPTER III.

But being still under the necessity

The Treason

of count of biding his time (for Louis, with
Matuoii. t j le J3 utc h on his hands, could

send no serviceable army into Italy), the
Abbe had barely made this decision when
he began to devise means to delay the
departure of Mattioli. ' Here again fortune
favoured him ; and the Duke was at this time
so beset, harassed, and importuned by the
Spaniards to declare himself against France,
that Mattioli, fearful of leaving him, resolved
to postpone his journey to France. This was
in the third week of May (1678). On the 9th
of July, d'Estrades advises Pomponne that
Mattioli is to start almost immediately, and

TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLI. 207

that he should reach Paris in September.
" We have calculated the time together, and
he cannot and ought not to leave his master
sooner." Mattioli himself begins to be appre-
hensive "that these delays may give a bad
opinion of him " : they were, in truth, just what
the French designs required.

Towards the end of the month the Duke is
in attendance on his Duchess-mother, ill of
a fever. "If God should call her to Himself,
the affair of Casale would without doubt be
more easy to conclude." However, the lady
lives ; and the affair continues to move.
Mattioli does not cease to assure the Abbe
that the Duke is " always firm in his design
of putting himself under the protection " of
Louis — of which, indeed, there was very little
question.

Still, Mattioli cannot get off to France.
The Abbe himself precedes him thither :
partly, it would seem, on a holiday, and partly

208 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

in connection with the negotiations. He is
succeeded at Venice by Pinchesne, from whose
first despatch to Pomponne — September 3rd,
1678 — we learn that Mattioli has been ill, but
hopes soon to be able to commence his journey
to the Court. Nine days later, it is Mattioli
who writes concerning his illness to Louis, de-
ploring the further delay it has occasioned him.
" The eagerness I have is extraordinary, to be
able with all possible celerity to throw myself
at your Majesty's feet."

It is the 29th of October before we know
that he is actually off : Pinchesne has news of
him, "written from Berheta on the 26th of this
month." Meanwhile, as late as November
1 8th, Paris has not yet beheld him. " Neither
the Count Mattioli nor the Sieur Giuliani,"
writes Pomponne from Versailles, " is yet
arrived here." At the end of the month
Mattioli was really in Paris.

No time was lost now in drawing to a close.

TREASON OF COUNT MATT 10 LI. 2*9

D'Estrades was already in Paris ; and with him
and M. de Pomponne, Charles's minister had
several interviews. A treaty was quickly
agreed upon, of which the following were the
chief stipulations : —

1. That the Duke of Mantua should receive
the French troops into Casale.

2. That if Louis XIV. sent an army into
Italy, the Duke of Mantua should be appointed
generalissimo.

3. That upon the execution of the treaty, the
sum of one hundred thousand crowns should
be paid to the Duke of Mantua.

Altogether a wonderful bargain from the
standpoint of the King of France. For a mere
,£12,000 or so, he acquired a splendid fortress
which, with the one that was already his at
Pignerol, would enable him to control the
destinies of Northern Italy. The Court may
well have been astonished at the terms, and
at the ease and rapidity with which the whole

14

2fo THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

affair had been concluded. Moreover, so skil-
fully had it been contrived, on the part of
Pomponne, of d'Estrades, of Pinchesne, and
of the small number of the Duke of Mantua's
abettors, that no whisper of the plot had
reached the Duchess Dowager or any of her
circle.

Mattioli was admitted to secret audience by
Louis, who presented him with a ring and a
sum of money, and promised that his son
should be a king's page, and that his brother,
who was in the Church, should receive pre-
ferments Mattioli then prepared to return
to Italy.

The secrecy which had been all along
observed was still maintained. Pomponne,
advising Pinchesne of the Italian's departure
from France, bade him " keep the journey very
secret." Varano, one of the two persons to
whom the Duke of Mantua had confided the

* Delort, Ellis, Topin.

TREASON OF COUNT MATTWLI. 211

design, was advised by Pinchesne that he had
a letter for his Highness from France ; and
Varano proposed .they should meet in mask
at the opera. At about the same date (we are
now in the closing days of 1678) Pomponne
instructed Pinchesne that he was sending him
a new cipher by courier ; and the old pre-
cautions were kept up.

" The courier whom I despatch to you
has orders not to go to your house as a
courier, but to enter Venice as a tradesman,
or as a private French individual who goes
there on his own business. He brings you
a cipher, which you will employ only in
what concerns the affairs of the Duke of
Mantua. We have been afraid that, for
so important a business, the cipher of the
Abbe d'Estrades was too old, and had
probably been discovered in the many times
it passed through the territories of Milan."

The scheme having advanced thus far,

14*

212 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Louis was now eager to see it to the end.
The able Louvois, in whom Topin discerns
the finest genius for organisation up to the
era of Napoleon, rapidly prepared the whole
plan of action. A strong body of troops,
placed under the command of the Marquis de
Boufflers, Colonel General of Dragoons, was
assembled at Briancon, ready to pass the
frontier. Baron d'Asfeld, Colonel of Dragoons,
set out for Venice, with a commission to
exchange the ratification of the treaty. Catinat,
then Brigadier of Infantry,* went " dans le
plus grand mystere" to Pignerol, where he
was to conceal himself in the fortress, and
to take for the time being the name of
de Richemont. The first despatch of Louvois
to Saint-Mars concerning this affair has refer-
ence to the coming of Catinat. It is dated
from St. Germain-en-Laye, Dec. 29th, 1678.

* Afterwards the celebrated Marshal. Voltaire says of him that he
united philosophy to great military talents.

TREASON OF COUNT MATTWLL 213

" These few words are to inform you that
it is necessary for the King's service that
the person from whom you will receive this
should enter the citadel of Pignerol, unknown
to anyone. With this in view, let the Safety
Gate * remain open until night-fall, and send
him one of your servants ; or better, if you
are able, go yourself to meet him at the
spot to which his valet will conduct you, in
order that he may pass into the citadel and
dungeon in your suite, without being observed
by anyone."

Louis had already written to the Duke of
Mantua : —

" My Cousin, —

" The Count Mattioli will instruct you so
particularly, both as to the manner in which
he performed the orders with which you
charged him for me, and as to the extreme

* Porte de Secours.

2i 4 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK,

satisfaction with which I have received his
assurances of your zeal for my interests, that
I can have nothing further to add upon these
subjects. I am only desirous of stating that
I wish you to place entire confidence in my
friendship. You may promise yourself that it
will be both useful and glorious to you upon
all occasions, and you may always rely
securely upon my alliance. I hope to be able
to give you in the end unmistakable proofs
of this. Having testified to you the satis-
faction which the conduct of Count Mattioli
has afforded me throughout the whole of this
affair, I will add only that I pray God to
have you, my Cousin, in His high and holy
keeping.

" Written at Versailles, this 8th Dec. 1678.

" Louis,
[and under the King's

signature],

Arnaud."

TREASON OF COUNT MATT 10 LI. 215

D'Asfeld arrived in Venice on the 21st of
January, 1679, and at once communicated his
orders to Pinchesne ; but nothing could be
agreed upon until Mattioli came, who was still
journeying slowly from Paris. They were,
however, resolved to persuade Charles of
Mantua to be at Casale by the 20th of Feb-
ruary, to make the exchange of the treaty,
and to prepare for the entry of the French
troops. On the part of the French, in fine,
all was now impatience where before it had
been anxiety for delay. There was sufficiency
of reason for this, since the massing of
Louis's troops on the frontier must soon alarm
the House of Austria ; and, in fact, the march
towards Pignerol had begun in the last days
of January. But just as, when the nego-
tiations were at an early stage, they advanced
too rapidly for the pleasure and convenience
of Louis, so now, when everything was in
readiness on the French side, and Louvois's

2i6 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

plans were actually in execution, delay arose
upon delay beyond the frontier.

On reaching Italy, Mattioli was again
smitten with fever, but he managed to see
Pinchesne and d'Asfeld in the first week of
February. Then it appeared that the Duke
could not possibly go to Casale earlier than
the ioth of March. He alleged, through
Mattioli, (i) a want of money ; (2) the fear
he had of leaving behind at Mantua Don
Vincent Gonzaga, his heir presumptive,* at
so critical a juncture ; and (3) " the obligation
he found himself under of holding a sort of
carousal with several Venetian gentlemen."
Pinchesne, in excusing to Pomponne the

* ' ' Vincent Gonzaga, Count of St. Paul, afterwards Duke of
Guastalla, was descended from a younger son of Ferrant II., first Duke
of Guastalla. After contesting for many years his right to that
Duchy with Ferdinand Charles IV., Duke of Mantua (during which
they were both merely made use of, by turns, as the instruments of the
French and Austrian domination), he was finally successful in estab-
lishing himself at Guastalla in 1706, where he died April 28th, 1714."
—Ellis.

TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLI. 217

apparent triviality of the third of these rea-
sons, thinks that, after all, the spectacle of
his Highness dallying with his pleasures in
a season of political unquiet, may assist to
draw off the suspicions which are beginning
to gather about him. In any event, Charles
was clearly bent upon keeping his engage-
ment with Louis.

But the need of swift, decisive action did
not diminish. " Meanwhile, Sir," runs a
despatch of Pinchesne on the 18th of Feb-
ruary, " I think it right to inform you that
the march of the troops to Pignerol, and the
munitions and money that are carried there,
cause genuine alarm in all Italy. It is even
publicly stated here that the King has some
great design, albeit no one can say what it
is ; suspicion falling now upon Casale, now
upon Geneva, and now upon Savoy, but more
particularly upon the Republic of Genoa, by
reason of what has lately passed there. I

218 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

even know that M. Contarini * has written
in these terms to Venice." More than this,
the Spanish Ambassador and the Abbe
Frederic, the resident of the Emperor, went
to the Duke of Mantua and plainly told
him " they had heard from Turin that he
wished to give Casale and the Montferrat "
to the King of France ; representing in
strong terms " the disadvantages that would
arise to all Italy from such an action, and
particularly to the House of Savoy, on
account of the Duchy of Milan." Charles
denied it roundly, wondering how the gen-
tlemen " could believe in reports of this
nature " ; nevertheless, adds Pinchesne, " he
is always in the intention of executing the
treaty he has made with the King."

But the circumstances were becoming tick-
lish, and Pomponne deemed it well to be more
pressing with Mattioli. Addressing him on

* Ambassador from the Venetian Republic to the Court of Louis XIV.

TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLI. 219

the 2 1 st of February, he wrote: "I have not
failed to inform the King of your sorrow for
the long delay over an affair which was begun
and is to be concluded through your agency/'
And he added with some significance : " His
Majesty is still willing to promise himself suc-
cess in this enterprise, and will entertain no
doubt that the promise so solemnly given him
is to be fulfilled."

Pinchesne and d'Asfeld on their part con-
tinued to ply him ; and towards the end of
February it was arranged that d'Asfeld and
Mattioli should go on the 9th of the following
month to the village of Notre- Dame d'Increa,
ten miles from Casale, there to make exchange
of the ratifications ; while the Duke of Mantua
should be at Casale " without fail" on the
evening of the 15th, to wait for the troops of
Louis (due to arrive on the 18th), and to put
them in possession of the place.

By this time alarums were shaking all the

22o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

north of Italy. From Turin, from Milan, from
Mantua rumour, growing ever more definite,
flowed in unceasingly. Suspicions, writes
Pinchesne, were beginning to change into
certainties that Charles of Mantua had made
a treaty with Louis for the cession of
Casale and the Montferrat. The Governor of
Milan sends couriers flying to Madrid and
Vienna to give intelligence to the Emperor and
the King of Spain. " The courier to Vienna
returned here * on Wednesday evening, with
express orders to the Marquis Canozza, the
Imperial Vicar in Italy, to speak strongly to
the Duke of Mantua, and to deter him if
possible, from doing a thing so contrary to the
interests of the whole House of Austria; and
to go afterwards to Turin and Milan, to
concert there the means of preventing it, in
case the news proved true." The Duke, who
showed no disposition to break his engagement

*To Venice.

TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLL 221

with Louis, found excuses to keep the Imperial
Vicar at arm's length. Pinchesne began to be
in dread that the Spaniards, more and more
jealous and distrustful, might oppose Charles's
passage through the Duchy of Milan, and that
of Mattioli, " whom they doubt as much."

But it was not on the Duke of Mantua or on
Mattioli that hands were laid. Like a
thunderbolt the news fell upon Versailles that
d'Asfeld had been arrested on his way to
Notre- Dame d'Increa, and was held prisoner
by the Governor of Milan* in the interests of
the Spaniards. This was a check indeed ; and
now at once the suspicions of the French
began to fasten upon Mattioli, who had been
the first to send the news of d'Asfeld's mis-
fortune. Louis and his agents, it is true, were
unwilling as yet to consider themselves be-
trayed : the seizure of d'Asfeld might have
been no more than an unlucky accident ; the

* The Count de Melgar, Spanish Governor of the Milanese.

222 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

affair might still be carried through. But there
was no time to lose. The 24th of March had
come, and Mattioli had not gone to Notre-
Dame d'Increa and the Duke had not gone to
Casale. D'Estrades (now Ambassador at
Turin), the soul of the enterprise from the
first, was sending courier on the heels of
courier ; to Venice, for Pinchesne ; to Mantua,
for the Duke ; and everywhere in Northern
Italy for Mattioli. Acting upon the instruc-
tions of Pomponne, the French agents in Italy
were careful not to communicate to Mattioli
their doubts of his good faith ; but d'Estrades
wrote him a letter in which the mailed hand
might be felt through the glove.

" If," says the Abbe, " I had not been aware
of your probity, and of your zeal for the
interests of his Majesty, and for the welfare of
the Prince to whom you are attached, I should
have been seriously uneasy at the delay of our
affair, which ought without fail, and at the

TREASON OF COUNT MATTIOLI. 223

latest, to have been concluded at the beginning
of this month. But although we are already
at the 24th, and all that you can desire on our
part is in readiness, I cannot bring myself to
think that his Highness's intentions and your
own are other than they always were. You
have so well understood how useful this affair
would be to him at the present time, and how
glorious in the future, and you have so ably
represented this to him, that I cannot permit
myself any suspicions on this head. Neither
can I, when I reflect upon the very consider-
able interest you have in completing an under-
taking of such importance, the conclusion of
which will be esteemed so great a merit on
your part by the most generous and the most
powerful King in the world, who has himself
testified to you the good-will he bears you

for it As his word has always

been inviolable, you no doubt rely implicitly
upon it ; you must be aware also how

224 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

dangerous it would be to deceive him and
that, after all the steps he has taken, and the
measures he has agreed upon, you would
expose his Highness and yourself to very great
misfortunes if his Majesty had reason to think
that faith had not been kept with him. ,,

But March went out, and the treaty had not
been ratified ; nor had Mattioli and the Duke
kept their appointments. Versailles is all
in profound uncertainty; as late as the 18th
of April, we have Pomponne writing to
Pinchesne — " It is still very difficult to dis-
cover what is the real case with this affair, and
whether the good faith that was to be desired
in it has been kept. Try to discover this
adroitly, but without showing any suspicions ;
and be careful to inform me of everything that
shall come to your knowledge on the subject."
Writing again on the following day, the
minister makes it sufficiently plain that his
own suspicions of Mattioli's treachery are

TREASON OF COUNT MATT10L1. 225

confirmed ; and respecting the Duke, he
says : " In truth, this Prince should not be
allowed to think that it is permitted him to
fail in a treaty he has made with his Majesty.
If the occasion should present itself, make it
appear to him that you cannot doubt his keep-
ing the promises which have been made to
the King." This suggests that, with or
without Mattioli, it may still be possible, in
the opinion of Versailles, to bring the scheme
to an issue of success.

In a moment that hope was extinguished
and annihilated. Intelligence of everything
that had taken place between Louis XIV. and
Charles of Mantua was conveyed simultane-
ously to the Courts of Turin, Madrid, Vienna,
to the Spanish Governor of the Milanese., and
to the Inquisitors of State of the Venetian
Republic

" To all, in a word, who were most inter-
ested in opposing the execution of the project,

15

226 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

it was known point by point : the price of
the cession, the date at which it was to^be
made, the names of the negotiators. They
knew everything, because they had received
at sundry times the confidences of the prin-
cipal and best-instructed among the actors in
the intrigue — of Count Mattioli himself." *

It was true — Mattioli had played the traitor.
He had sold his master ; he had sold and
made a jest of the Omnipotence of France.

* Topin.

227

CHAPTER IV.

" Never was seen," exclaims Pom-

The Vengeance . 1 i r i

ponne, in a despatch ot the

of •• the Most r r

Generous" 3rd of May, " so signal a piece
of perfidy ! "
Maria Baptista of Nemours,* Duchess and
Regent of Savoy, and one of her ministers,
President Turki, or Trucci, were the first
who had received the confidences of Mattioli.
To the Duchess he had shown the original
documents of the negotiations, of which she
had taken copies: facts which she herself com-
municated to Louis XIV. Mattioli had seen
the President at Turin. He had given in-
formation to the Spaniards, and had accepted

* Mother of Victor Amadeus II., at this time a minor.

15*

228 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

a cipher from the Spanish Governor of
Milan. He had had secret interviews with
one of the Inquisitors of State at Venice.
All this, with sundry pleas and glosses,
Mattioli afterwards confessed to Catinat.*

The real motive or motives of this whole-
sale treason will never be clearly known, for
they were never divulged by Mattioli ; and
we have little choice but to acquiesce in the
general conclusion, which is — in M. Funck-
Brentano's words — that he had cynically be-
trayed both his master and Louis XIV., in
order to reap a double harvest of gold.
Topin asks generously whether this '■ gross
cupidity " is the sole explanation; and sug-
gests that, " shaken to his soul, and illumined
by the sudden apparition of his country in
danger," Mattioli in remorse may have fallen
back upon the one and only means of check-
ing the advance of Louis. But this palliative,

* Catinat to Louvois ; May ioth, 1679.

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 229

well as it becomes its author, is not easy
of acceptance ; for the conduct of Mattioli,
after his return from France, bears every
appearance of trickery and duplicity. If he
designed to save Italy from Louis, he hid
his project from his master, the Duke of
Mantua ; and he certainly did not return, as
he should have done, the French King's
presents. These are Topin's own admissions,
and he has manifestly little faith in the
hypothesis which his good-nature propounds.
Mattioli had presumably acted with his
eyes open, but he seems to have taken no
measures for his own safety in the event ot
detection ; and the discovery of his treason
had left him in a terrible situation. Charles
of Mantua repudiated him, declaring that he
had never authorised any negotiations for the
sale or occupation of Casale. But Charles
the insouciant was scarcely a dangerous
enemy ; and it is probable that, while he

2 3 o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

might be willing to assist in his punishment,
Mattioli had not much to fear from him.
His real danger lay elsewhere. D'Estrades
had beheld with feelings of mortification and
intense bitterness the failure of a project in
which he had had from the first the closest
personal interest. The details were his, the
negotiations had been begun by him, he it
was who had selected Mattioli, and it was
by him that Mattioli had been introduced at
the Court of France. Louvois, for his part,
had been baffled in the execution of the
plans he had so adroitly laid ; and a French
minister beaten at his own game of intrigue
by an Italian adventurer was little likely to
find himself in the humour of forgiveness.
D'Estrades and Louvois, moreover, had acted
not for themselves but for their master the
King ; and when the projects of Kings are
confounded their ministers are very apt to be
held blameworthy.

O be

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 233

But there was a vengeance infinitely more
to be dreaded than that of either Louvois or
D'Estrades. Mattioli had drawn upon himself'
the resentment, the implacable resentment,
of Louis XIV. True, Louis had not at this
time lost all hope of securing Casale ; but,
for the immediate present, it was not Casale
that filled his thoughts : it was the unspeak-
able, the incredible effrontery of the man
who had outwitted, cheated, and flouted him
in the face of Europe. Europe was ringing
with the discomfiture of Louis ; Europe was
silently laughing at the Grand Monarque.
It is necessary to recall his position among
the Powers of that day, the splendid successes
that had attended his arms, and his almost
dictatorial attitude towards the Sovereigns
his contemporaries, in order to appreciate
the extent of the humiliation which Mattioli's
treachery had brought upon the King of
France. " The most generous " King was

234 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

d'Estrades's description of him. It was the
unlucky fate of Nicolas Fouquet to submit
to the test the generosity of Louis XIV.
towards one whom he feared even in defeat.
" Let us be content with banishing this man,"
Fouquet's judges had said. " No," said the
King: "he shall end his days in prison."
And that was in the green tree, and it was
now the dry : Louis was in his forty-first
year. Again, what was Fouquet's offence
in comparison with that of Mattioli ? Fou-
quet had enriched himself at the State's
expense, and he had courted and had won
a popularity which fretted the King's com-
placency. But he had not broken faith with
Louis, he had not contemptuously bartered
his interests, he had not openly made light
of that jealous and sensitive dignity — he had
not given Europe the opportunity to smirk
over the humbling defeat of a Roi Soleil.
Fouquet, for his popularity in Paris, died

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 235

an old, sick man, in the dungeon of Pignerol.
What fate should Mattioli look for ?

Abbe d'Estrades was to have the pleasure
of suggesting it. He proposed to Versailles
that Mattioli should be seized, abducted, and
imprisoned " at the King's pleasure." Illegal
arrests and imprisonments were not extra-
ordinary in France at any date before the
Revolution ; but the case of Mattioli was
unusual. He was, as Ellis says : " actually
the plenipotentiary of the Duke of Mantua,
for concluding a treaty with the King of
France." Although his treachery was known,
it had not been proved against him ; and,
from the standpoint of international law, it is
not an argument that the Duke of Mantua
was a prince of no political consequence.
The proposal to seize and carry off his
minister was, in the circumstances, a proposal
of brigandage. But it came pat to Louis's
purpose and intention of revenge. He saw

236 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the illegality of it ; but, if it could be effected
without scandal, he asked nothing better.
Absolute secrecy in the business of the arrest
was all that he demanded — and his private
authorisation to d'Estrades was modified only
by this condition — "that you get him carried
off without the least suspicion of scandal."

Satisfied by d'Estrades upon this point,
Louis sanctioned the kidnapping of Mattioli.
He was to be conveyed to Pignerol, and
kept there "in the strictest secrecy." "Look
to it," ran the closing words of the King's
order, " that no one knows what becomes
of this man."

This was followed by the despatch of
Louvois to Saint-Mars at Pignerol, dictated
by Louis, the tone of which is eloquent of
the mood that inspired it : —

" Saint-Germain, April 27th, 1679.
" The King has sent orders to the Abbe

" THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 237

d'Estrades to procure the arrest of a man with
whose conduct his Majesty has reason to be
displeased. I am commanded to acquaint
you with this, in order that you may not
hesitate to receive him when he is sent to
you. You will guard him in such a manner
that, not only may he have no communication
with anyone, but that he may have cause to
repent his conduct, and that no one may know
you have a new prisoner.

" De Louvois."

Instructions in these terms imposed the
necessity of a ruse ; but the Abbe d'Estrades,
keen upon requitals, was ready there.
Mattioli, whose subalpine shrewdness seems
to have missed him at this highest crisis of
his life, was quite unaware that Louis and
his agents had unriddled him. He did not
know that the Duchess of Savoy had sent
to Versailles the copies of the papers he had

238 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

shown her. His utter ignorance of the
danger he stood in made it easy to set the
trap that must catch him.

Although vengeance was certainly the first
motive of Mattioli's arrest, there was another
which, if the negotiations for Casale were
to be proceeded with, was not unimportant.
The Varano who had all along been privy
to the affair, had instructed d'Estrades,
through the assiduous Giuliani, that the Duke
of Mantua would go no further with it while
Mattioli was at large. The Duke himself
appears to have been averse from, or at all
events not inclined to, a personal reckoning
with the agent in whom he had implicitly
confided ; but he was willing enough that
Mattioli should be brought to book by any-
body else. D'Estrades also learned from
Varano that Mattioli had privately obtained
Charles's signature to the treaty (for what
reason, unless with an eye to blackmail, it

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 239

is impossible to conjecture), and had kept
the original document, with all other papers
bearing on the negotiations. By what means,
asked d'Estrades of Pomponne, were these
likely to be secured, unless by the arrest of
Mattioli ? That act, therefore, while gratify-
ing the vengeance of Louis and his ministers,
would render possible a renewal of the nego-
tiations, and would be far from displeasing to
the Duke of Mantua, whom it was desirable to
retain in friendship.

Mattioli was now again in Turin, where,
as we have seen, d'Estrades was installed
as French Ambassador ; he was still visit-
ing the Abbe, and talking and acting as
though he were as busy as ever in the
matter of Casale. D'Estrades, with Nemesis
in his heart, entertained him smoothly ; and
affected always to believe that everything
was secure. Through Giuliani, who was
solid throughout in the interests of the

2 4 o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

French, d'Estrades learned that Mattioli was
seeking money. His expenses in France,
his journeys to and fro in Italy, and his
bribes to win over the Duke's mistresses,
had drained his purse. D'Estrades sug-
gested a ready means of replenishing it.
Catinat (he said), who commanded the
French troops that were to take possession
of Casale, was furnished, by the King's
order, with ample means ; and was prepared,
by the King's order, to meet every expense
that might arise. Mattioli took the bait.
'* Being one of the most consummate rogues
that ever lived" ("Comme il est un des plus
grands fripons qui ait jamais este "), wrote
D'Estrades, " this hint of mine made him
desperately eager to meet Catinat."

Catinat was warned, and the meeting was
arranged. It was to be at a spot " on
the frontier towards Pignerol " — Catinat, said
d'Estrades, not being able " to leave the

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 241

neighbourhood where his troops were
stationed." D'Estrades, not anxious to risk
his skin, stipulated for " a few well-armed
men " in Catinat's company : " as I know
that Mattioli always carries two pistols in
his pocket, and two others, with a poniard,
in his belt."

D'Estrades gave him rendez-vous at six
o'clock on the morning of the 2nd of May,
1679, at a church on the outskirts of Turin :
they were to drive thence to the frontier.
Unfriendly fortune led Mattioli to the meet-
ing-place. For months he had failed in the
appointments which it would have profited
him to keep ; but he was punctual at the
one fatal tryst of his life. D'Estrades had
with him in his carriage a cousin, the Abbe
de Montesquieu ; and in this company Count
Mattioli set out for the frontier.

There had been heavy rains for three

days, and the streams of that wild region

16

242 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

were pouring over their banks. One of
these, the Guisiola, not far from the spot
where Catinat waited with his men-at-arms,
the Abbe's party must cross ; but the bridge
had been damaged by the flood, and the
horses could only ford the stream by swim-
ming. This, apparently, the Abbe, precious
of his charge, declined to risk ; but it was
possible to make the bridge safe for foot-
passage, and to work they went — Mattioli
himself, says d'Estrades, "helping so bravely,
that in an hour we were able to get across.' '
The carriage was left behind, the Abbe
congratulating himself on getting rid of his
servants, "as this ensured us a greater
measure of secrecy." The journey was con-
tinued on foot, "dans des chemins fort
mauvais " ; and Catinat, bearing in his hands
the vengeance of Louis, awaited them at
the chosen spot. " M. Catinat," writes the
Abbe, " had made his arrangements so well

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 243

that not a creature appeared with him.
He led us into a room " ; and then, before
the real object of the meeting was declared,
d'Estrades adroitly and insensibly admonished
Mattioli " respecting all the original papers
belonging to our affair." Mattioli, who must
now at last have begun to realise his
danger, said that all the papers were in
a box at Bologna, in the hands of his
wife, who had retired to the convent of
the Nuns of St. Louis. Upon this, deeming
his presence not necessary in the scene that
was to follow, d'Estrades withdrew, accom-
panied by his cousin ; and Mattioli was left
with Catinat. At two in the afternoon,
Saint-Mars had him under lock in the dun-
geon of Pignerol.

Catinat's despatch to Louvois (Pignerol,
May 3rd, 1679) is of soldier-like direct-
ness: — "I arrested Mattioli yesterday, three

miles from here, upon the King's territories,

16*

244 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

during the interview which the Abbe
d'Estrades had ingeniously contrived between
him, Mattioli, and myself, to facilitate the
scheme. For the arrest, I employed only
the Chevaliers de Saint-Martin and de
Villebois, two officers of M. de Saint-Mars,
and four men of his company. It was
effected without the least violence, and no
one knows the rogue's name, not even the
officers who assisted. He is in the cham-
ber which Dubreuil occupied, where he will
be civilly treated, according to the request
of the Abbe d'Estrades, until the wishes
of the King with regard to him are
known." *

* "Finally," says M. Funck-Brentano, "we have a very curious
pamphlet entitled La Prudenza trionfante di Casale, written in 1682,
that is, little more than two years after the event, and— this slight de-
tail is of capital importance — thirty years before there was any talk of
the Man in the Mask. In this we read : ' The Secretary (Mattioli) was
surrounded by ten or twelve horsemen, who seized him, disguised him,
masked him, and conducted him to Pignerol ' — a fact, moreover, con-
firmed by a tradition which in the eighteenth century was still rife in
the district, where scholars succeeded in culling it."

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 245

Among the papers taken on Mattioli's
person were none of the series emanating
from Versailles. These it was essential to
secure ; they were the tangible proofs of
Louis's failure. Mattioli had said they
would be found at Bologna. They were
not there. Under threats of torture and
of death, the prisoner at length confessed
that the original papers were at Padua,
" concealed in a hole in the wall of a
room, in his father's house." Thereupon a
letter was dictated, in which, without a word
that could betray his situation, Mattioli was
made to request his father to deliver the
documents to Giuliani. The father, suspect-
ing nothing, handed them over : Pinchesne
presently received them all ; and they were
forwarded, with rigorous care, to Versailles.

Louis XIV. was avenged. If he had
received at the hands of the petty minister
of a petty prince his first serious check

246 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

in Europe, his retaliation had been swift
and terrible. Nor did Europe enjoy for
long the spectacle of the potent King's
defeat. The guilty principal in the affair
had already vanished from the sight and
knowledge of men, into the entrails of
Pignerol, and would be beheld of them no
more. The official proofs of the aborted
enterprise were not less secure under
Louis's hands than was Mattioli in the
wardenship of Saint-Mars. The French
troops had been withdrawn as secretly as
they had been assembled at BrianQon. The
whole scheme was renounced so promptly
that, in Topin's phrase, it seemed, in a
manner, as though it had never been
begun.* The Court of Savoy undoubtedly

* Not, however, that Louis had really abandoned his project. He
wanted it forgotten only until such time as he could accomplish it with-
out possibility of failure. The negotiations were resumed two years
later ; and on the 30th of September, 1681, the French troops were re-
ceived into Casale.

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 247

had a full knowledge of the intrigue ;
"but Louis XIV. spoke with a master's
authority at Turin." Mattioli had un-
doubtedly made disclosures at Venice as
at Milan ; but those beguiling lips were
sealed eternally behind the bastions and
demi-lunes of Pignerol. And the affronted
King bore himself as high as ever. He
demanded and obtained from Spain the
immediate release of Baron d'Asfeld, im-
prisoned at Milan ; and the censure of
Melgar, the governor. At all points, and
in a space of time the briefest, Louis re-
covered the prestige which for a moment
he had sacrificed ; and his personal pride,
at once delicate and vengeful, was best
solaced by the certainty that he had swept,
as he thought, into eternal oblivion the
agent and chief witness of his short dis-
credit. Mattioli was given out as dead :
a story was circulated that he had met

248 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

with a fatal accident on a journey. The
Duke of Mantua might have doubted this,
and probably did doubt it ; but he had
sufficient reason for wishing out of his path
the agent who, for objects of his own, had
striven his best to ruin him with Louis
XIV.

And the family of Mattioli — why were
they silent ? Upon this point, history has
bequeathed us the curious legacy of an un-
finished tragedy — curious to us, who can
follow the tragedy to its end. Did his
family also believe him dead, or were they
cowed and voiceless under the stroke of
Louis's wrath ? It is not known. What
alone is certain is, that he was never found
by them again. The letter dictated to
Mattioli, and signed under compulsion, was
the last that his father received from him.
His wife died in the convent of the Filles
de Saint- Louis at Bologna, while he . was

"THE MOST GENEROUS" KING. 249

still a hopeless prisoner : there is no record
to show that his fate was known to her.
The space within the genealogical tree of
the family, which the date of Mattioli's
death should fill, is blank.* Louis's ven-
geance smote deep : in annihilating the man,
it had crushed the family ; and perhaps
nothing is sadder in the memories of this
mystery of two hundred years, apart from
the fate of the Mask himself, than the
wretched ignorance in which his abduction
and living burial left his nearest kin.

* Topin : citing the Arbor prisac nobilisque masculine? families de
Mattiolis.

250

The

CHAPTER V.

Good night, good night !

Romeo and Juliet.

May be seen to-day, on the flanks
Dungeon of of Alpine heights, near the source

Pigneroi Q f t ke streams which go to form
the rich basin of the Po, the ruins of
the dungeon wherein Mattioli began the
long night of his captivity. Close by stands
the Cathedral church of Saint-Maurice, " dou
la vue embrasse," says Topin, " le plus
riant horizon."

As different as might be was the face dis-
closed by Pigneroi on the day that Catinat
carried in his prisoner through the Safety
Gate — the small secure postern which led
straight into the recesses of the dungeon. A
citadel, a dungeon : around the citadel a town,

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 251

itself enclosed within vast fortifications, at the
entrance of the valley of the Perouse, on the
river Chisone, seven leagues south-west of
Turin, twenty-eight from Nice, and thirty
east of Grenoble — such was Pignerol, the
Piedmontese town of the 17th century.*

The little town, which, as early as the 12th
century, the princes of Savoy had fortified
for the surety of their possessions, climbed
upwards in the form of an amphitheatre ;
with russet roofs and slender campaniles and
clusters of turret-fashioned chimneys. A
moat isolated the citadel from the town ; and
from the citadel the eye followed a double
line of solid walls, forming a huge paral-
lelogram, with four high towers for supports :
in the midst of all, the great square keep or
dungeon, black of aspect, " aux fenetres
bardees de fer." The fortifications were
composed of a series of bastions, half-moons,

* lung.

252 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

and counter-guards. The two main gates of
the town were named of France and of
Turin ; the secret or Safety Gate was
opened at rare times to admit by stealth
some prisoner whose guards had been
ordered not to take him through the town.

This little mountain bourg of Pignerol,*
peopled by French troops and Italian sub-
jects, was not inconsiderable in the 17th
century. The officers in chief were the
governor general, the commandant of the
town, the King's lieutenant governing the
citadel, the commandant of the dungeon, the
members of the council of war, and of the
" conseil souverain " ; a fair posse for a
world so tiny. There was the perpetual
va-et-vient of a frontier place : officers from
Paris or Turin, rejoining their regiments in
the army of Italy, passed through ; there was
much traffic and some commerce.

* Ital.. Pinerolo.

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 253

At the time of the coming of Mattioli to
Pignerol, the dungeon of that place had
been for fourteen years the charge of
.Benigne d'Auvergne de Saint-Mars, seigneur
of Dimon and of Palteau, bailli and governor
of Sens. Born in 1626, in the environs of
Montfort l'Amaury, Saint-Mars died in the
Bastille, its governor, September 26th, 1708,
in his eighty-second year. At the age of
twelve he had entered, as " enfant de
troupe," the First Company of the King's
Musketeers. In 1650 he was a full musketeer
of that Company ; in 1660, brigadier ; and
" marechal des logis," or quarter-master, in
1664. The year following, 1665, saw him in
command of the dungeon of Pignerol, in
which command he continued until he went
to the fortress of Exiles in 1681. Louis XIV.
granted him a patent of nobility in 1673.
At the date we are arrived at (1679), Saint-
Mars was in his fifty-fourth year ; of sinister

254 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

renown in Pignerol : the gaoler quintessen-
tialised.

lung calls him " un vrai bouledogue,"
but that term is applicable chiefly in the
moral sense. Observe him outwardly, as he
creeps, almost a-tiptoe, through the mazes of
his prison : a small shrivelled person,
shadowy of figure, wizen and dark of face,
little head bobbing nervously betwixt the
narrow shoulders, arms and hands twitching.
" A mortal ugly little man, looking eighty
at the least ; all bent and tottering ; inces-
santly in a passion ; swearing and blas-
pheming horribly ; inexorably cruel." This
is the unsympathetic portrait left of him by
Constantin de Renneville, a prisoner of the
Bastille when Saint-Mars was about seventy-
four. " Inexorablv cruel " seems not alto-
gether just ; indeed, I find few traces of
active cruelty in Saint- Mars's career as
gaoler ; but a man so inflexible and so callous

V

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 255

in doing the bidding of King or minister could
be nothing but the ogre of his prison.

It is proper to spare him the charge of
unnecessary cruelty, for his memory is void of
sympathy : on the one side, an unimaginative
pedant who has no rule for his prison but
the strictest letter of his orders from Ver-
sailles ; on the other, a mean and greedy
type of the soldier of fortune, always
whining for money and always bemoaning
his lot. He had peculiar relations with the
minister Louvois. His wife's sister was
Louvois's mistress, and he can ask nothing
of Louvois which Louvois does not grant.
The ideal gaoler, harassed incessantly by
fears for the safety of his prisoners, he
packs his coffers with the moneys sent him
for their keep. Holding them as wards of
the King, whom he served like a slave,
watching them so closely that he was himself
a prisoner in his own prisons for over forty

256 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

years, these charges of his were still, in his
private view, his " sitting hens"* ("aux
ceufs d'or ") ; and they were a fortune to
him. He left silver plate, furniture, jewels,
six hundred thousand francs of ready money,
and seign,eurial property worth ten million
francs. Among the governors of the prison-
fortresses of France, most of whom enriched
themselves at the cost of their prisoners and
of the State, the position and the possessions
of Saint-Mars were unique. As commandant
of the dungeon of Pignerol he held his
authority directly from the minister, owing
no responsibility either to the governor
general or to the King's lieutenant ; as
Louvois's relative (upon the left) he held the
minister in fee ; and what he asked of him
was granted in advance.

But, as the prince of gaolers, Saint-Mars
was worth humouring. His discretion was

* lung.

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 257

proof against all temptation ; and such was
his habit of distrust, in what concerned his
prisoners, that the distrustful Louvois him-
self found it possible at times to chide his
over-caution. Uneasy, timorous, and taciturn,
the duties of his office gave him never a
moment's rest. The King's orders were
fulfilled with a servile exactitude : to discuss
them, says Topin, would have seemed a
crime, to seek to interpret them was super-
fluous. No prison wall was high enough or
stout enough, no moat was deep enough
or wide enough, no bars or bolts were
strong enough, no sentinel was watchful
enough, no spy alert enough to keep that
anxious soul at rest. He carries every
detail of his cares to Louvois ; matters the
most puerile are constantly rehearsed in his
despatches. Does a stranger come to the
town on business or a visit of pleasure ; if
his sojourn is prolonged, Saint-Mars is

17

258 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

certain that a plot is hatching to carry off
some prisoner from the dungeon. Nay, if
the stranger shows some little curiosity con-
cerning the citadel, Saint-Mars arrests him out
of hand, and holds him captive during a pro-
longed examination. " Lists of the travellers
coming to Pignerol were drawn up for him
every month, that he might see what names
occurred too frequently. The prisoners' linen
before being sent out of the dungeon, was
soaked in water, then dried before a fire in
the presence of officers who had to make
sure that nothing had been written upon it.
The smallest change in the habits of his
prisoners drove Saint-Mars into a fever of
anxiety. In everything they did, and in
everything they abstained from doing, he
saw the signal of some criminal attempt ; and
one day, after his usual visit to Fouquet and
Lauzun, and his rigorous examination of their
rooms, discovering nothing out of the

-co

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 261

common, he was first surprised, and then
exceedingly alarmed. The absence of any-
apparent signal was in itself a signal for
him. . . . After reading his naive and
sincere correspondence, one is tempted to
pity him almost as much as the prisoners
in his keeping ; since, enjoying a scarcely
greater liberty than they did, the perpetual
fears that he suffered on their account
rendered him in some sort their victim." *

Such was the man into whose hands Catinat
gave Count Mattioli on the 2nd of May, 1679.
" He is in the chamber which Dubreuil
occupied, where he will be treated civilly,
according to the request of the Abbe
d'Estrades, until the King's wishes with re-
gard to him are known." Already, however,
the prisoner had lost his identity, for he was
passed into Pignerol, and received there,
under the name of Lestang : as Lestang, and

* Topin.

262 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK

by no other name, was he known in the
fortress, — save only to Saint-Mars. " The
King's wishes with regard to him" were very
soon made known. In less than a fortnight
from the day of Mattioli's arrest — the 15th
of May — Louvois wrote Saint-Mars concern-
ing him " . . . . that it is not the
intention of the King that the Sieur de
Lestang should be well treated, or that,
except the absolute necessaries of life, you
should give him anything to soften his cap-
tivity." Thus "the most generous King" —
whose commands are renewed on the 20th
of the month. "Your letter of the 10th of
this month " — it is Louvois again to Saint-
Mars — "has been delivered to me. I have
nothing to add to what I have already
commanded you respecting the severity
with which the person named Lestang must
be treated." Two days later, May 22nd :
" You must keep Lestang in the rigorous

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 263

confinement I enjoined in my former letters,
without allowing him to see a doctor, unless
you know he is in absolute want of one.''
Later, July 25th, Saint-Mars receives in-
structions that his prisoner may have writing
materials ; scarcely, however, for his own
solace. " You may give paper and ink to
the Sieur de Lestang, with permission to
put in writing whatever he wishes to say.
You will then send it to me, and I will let
you know whether it deserves any considera-
tion."

From the picture that history has left us
of Saint-Mars, it is easily inferred that he
would read aright the instruction to treat a
prisoner "with severity": but the proof
itself is not wanting. We have seen that
Mattioli was arrested in the beginning of
May, 1679. In eight months from that
time the rigours of his imprisonment had re-
sulted in the temporary loss of his reason

264 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

He was neither the first nor the last of the
State prisoners of pre-Revolutionary France
whom the dungeon reduced to madness.
Consider that these places were virtually
impenetrable ; that there were no inspectors
of prisons, no visiting justices ; and that the
governor in his dungeon wielded a power
scarcely less tremendous than the King at
Versailles. There was no system of ad-
ministration under which the prisoner could
stand upon his rights, with privilege of
appeal beyond the prison walls ; he had no
rights — save what were granted him as
peculiar favours. He depended in all things
upon the governor : a miserly governor
might starve and keep him cold and meanly
clad ; a cruel one had darker means at his dis-
posal, and used them — the torture, the whip,
the subterranean cachot were always there.
In eight months Mattioli had grown mad.
On the 6th of January, 1680, Saint-Mars

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 265

wrote to Louvois : — " I am obliged, Sir, to
inform you, that the Sieur de Lestang is
become like the monk I have the care of;
that is to say, subject to fits of raving mad-
ness ; from which the Sieur Dubreuil also is
not exempt." The methods of Saint-Mars
were rather fatal to sanity ; here were three
lunatics together at one time in Pignerol.
In the third week of February: "The Sieur
de Lestang, who has been nearly a year in
my custody, complains that he is not treated
as a man of his quality, and the minister of

a great prince, ought to be I

think he is deranged, by the way he talks
to me ; telling me he converses every day
with God and the angels ; that they have
told him of the death of the Duke of
Mantua and of the Duke of Lorraine ;
and, as an additional proof of his madness,
he says he has the honour of being nearly
related to the King, to whom he wishes to

266 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

write in complaint of the way I treat him.
I have not thought proper to give him
paper and ink for that purpose, perceiving
him not to be in his right senses."

Versailles was quite unmoved by these
recitals. Louvois, with the King behind
him, was still hardening his heart. Even
the consolations of religion were to be ad-
ministered within the very narrowest limits
imposed by the Church. " It will be suffi-
cient to let the prisoners of the lower
tower " — in which Mattioli was confined —
" confess once a year." In the same de-
spatch, the ioth of July: — "With regard to
the Sieur de Lestang, I wonder at your
patience, and that you should wait for an
order to treat such a rascal as he deserves,
when he is wanting in respect to you."

Then the mad Mattioli was put with the
mad Jacobin ; an economy on the part of
Saint-Mars, "to avoid the necessity of having

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 267

two priests." Mattioli, imagining the monk
a spy upon him, " walked about with long
strides, his cloak over his nose, crying out
that he was not a dupe." The Jacobin,
11 who was always seated on his truckle-bed,
with his elbows on his knees, looked at him
gravely, without listening to him " ; but one
day, "getting down from his bed, stark
naked," he set on preaching, " without rhyme
or reason " ; and preached till he could
preach no longer. With a naivety of con-
fession most characteristic, Saint- Mars adds :
" I and my lieutenants saw all their
manoeuvres through a hole above the door."
This is a sore history, not to be too
long pursued. Nearly all that is known
of Mattioli's life in Pignerol is concen-
trated into this' glimpse of the poor frenzied
pair, mewed together in their narrow
Bedlam, with " I and my lieutenants " watch-
ing them behind the door. Yet it was

268 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

better to be mad than sane — in Pignerol —
with Saint-Mars.

Fifteen years Mattioli lay here ; lived fif-
teen years on the vapours of Pignerol. A
solitary instance is recorded, pathetic enough
in the circumstances, of his attempt to win
over one of the lieutenants of Saint-Mars,
Blainvilliers by name, by the offer of a ring.
In some raving hour the prisoner had
written "abusive sentences with charcoal on
the wall," and Blainvilliers had threatened
him with beating. A day or two later, as
the officer was serving him with dinner,
Mattioli said : " Sir, here is a little ring,
which I wish to give you, and I beg you to
accept of it." Saint-Mars, in his inevitable
report to Louvois, conjectures it "well worth
fifty or sixty pistoles " : it was probably the
ring which Mattioli had received from
Louis XIV.

Concerning Pignerol, the rest is silence.

THE DUNGEON OF PIGNEROL. 269

Mountain and wood and stream hem round
that altitude of grey-black stone, where
Louis's prisoner sits through fifteen spectral
years.

270

CHAPTER VI.

It has been rightly said that the
interest of Count Mattioli's captivity

Inquisition * ■*

01 juies owes everything to the supposition

Loiseleur. . . • t • ' 1 1

that we have in him the actual
Man in the Mask. So closely did the
jealous anger of the King conceal him,
that his life in prison, mysterious even to
the creatures of Saint-Mars, has left scarcely
a trace in the real history of Pignerol,
of the Isles, or of the Bastille. Legend,
indeed, abounds ; but facts are of the
scantiest. Was this in truth the Man in
the Iron Mask ?

Who first sought to identify him ? Let
us summarise briefly on this head the ex-
haustive perquisitions of Topin. To begin

INQUISITION OF JUIES IOISEIEUR. 271

with, there is the political pamphlet already
cited, La Prudenza trionfante di Casale,
published in Cologne in 1682. Here is set
forth in detail the whole negotiation, with
the parts played by the Abbe d'Estrades
and Mattioli, Giuliani and Pinchesne, Catinat
and d'Asfeld, and the Duke of Mantua.
Five years later, in 1687, a compilation issued
at Leyde under the title Histoire abregee de
I'Ettrope gave the translation in French of
an Italian letter denouncing the abduction
of Mattioli. There is then a long interval.
In 1749, Muratori, in his Annali a" Italia,
related the history of the intrigue for Casale,
and the capture of the Duke of Mantua's
plenipotentiary. In 1770 appeared the letter
of Baron d'Heiss in the Journal Encyclo-
pedique, in which he says : "It appears that
this Secretary to the Duke of Mantua might
very well be the Man in the Iron Mask,
transferred from Pignerol to the Isles of

272 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Sainte-Marguerite, and thence to the Bastille
in 1690,* when M. de Saint-Mars became
governor of that place." In 1786, the Italian
Fantuzzi, in his Notizie degli scrittori
Bolognesi, summed up what had hitherto
been written on the subject. The same
opinion, that Mattioli was the Man in the
Mask, was sustained in the year of the
Revolution by the i( Chevalier de B.", in a
volume entitled Londres. — Correspondance
interceptee. In November, 1795, M. de
Chambrier, who had been Prussian minister
at the Court of Turin, essayed to prove in
a lecture delivered to the Belles-Lettres
class at the Academy of Berlin, that Count
Mattioli and the Man in the Iron Mask
were one and the same individual, f Just
one hundred years ago appeared the pamphlet

* It was in 1698 that Mattioli came to the Bastille.

t Mentioning the subject one day to a very intelligent German lady
of my acquaintance, she replied : "Mattioli? Yes, of course. We
were taught that at school."

INQUISITION OF JULES LOISELEUR. 273

of Roux-Fazillac, who was the first to publish
documents in support of his case. Much
more complete, however, were the documents
of Delort, whose small, well-reasoned treatise,
Histoire de P Homme au Masque de Fer y was
published in Paris in 1825. By permission
of Comte d'Hauterive, Keeper of the Archives
of the Office of Secretary of State for the
Foreign Department, Delort examined and
made excellent use of all the despatches
known at that day. The history that he
drew from them seemed conclusive. It is,
in effect, the true history ; but, as will be
seen, it is the true history with a very
important error. Ellis's work, which appeared
a year or two later (the second edition, whith
is before me, is dated 1827) was little more
than an adaptation of Delort's. Camille
Rousset, in his Histoire de Louvois, rehearses
once more the story of the negotiations, and

says : " We share the opinion of those who

18

274 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

hold that the Masque de Fer was none other
than Mattioli." Depping, in his Correspondance
administrative sous Louis XIV., is of the
same mind.

Except, however by Roux-Fazillac and
Delort, there was little attempt to prove that
the person arrested and carried to Pignerol
on the 2nd of May, 1679, was identical with
the prisoner who died in the Bastille on the
19th of November, 1703. And that, of course,
constitutes the knot of the problem. " That
Mattioli was seized in 1679 by a French
agent, and forcibly carried to Pignerol —
this, as we have seen, was a fact which had
long been known. But that intrigue is no
longer our sole concern : a mere preliminary
of the question which engages us. What
is essential is, to follow the minister of the
Duke of Mantua from prison to prison, and
to see not only whether he might have been,
but whether it is impossible that he should

INQUISITION OF JULES LOISELEUR. 275

not have been, that mysterious prisoner
brought by Saint-Mars in 1698 from the
Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille,
where he died in 1703. Delort believed
that he had proved it. His conviction was
profound, and to many his demonstration
seemed irrefutable."* But the documents
discovered by Delort did not contain the
whole history ; the omissions, in fact, were
serious, and we are now to see how a keen
examiner, detecting them, with one stroke
of his pen shattered the system — and left
the riddle of the Mask apparently insoluble
to the end of time.

Mattioli was incarcerated in Pignerol on
the 2nd of May, 1679. At this date the
dungeon held, besides Fouquet and Lauzun,
four other prisoners concerning whom it is
necessary to note that they were quite obscure
and unimportant persons. One of them,

* Topin.

18*

276 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Eustache Dauger, brought to Pignerol in
July, 1669, had served Fouquet in the capacity
of valet. Another, the Jacobin monk whom
we have seen sharing his cell with Mattioli,
and who had been imprisoned in April, 1674,
is branded by Louvois as " a finished rogue,
whom you cannot treat badly enough." He
was to have " no fire in his chamber, unless
he is ill or the severity of the cold compels
it, and no other nourishment than bread
with wine-and- water." The two remaining
prisoners were a certain La Riviere and the
Dubreuil whose name has been mentioned.
So insignificant were these, that when Saint-
Mars was called from the government of
Pignerol to that of Exiles, Louvois asked
ot him a memoir furnishing their names and
the reasons why they had been imprisoned.
It is clearly not among prisoners of such small
consideration, prisoners of whom the Minister
knows neither the names nor the causes of

INQUISITION OF JULES L01SELEUR. 277

their detention, that we shall find the Man
in the Mask. Fouquet died at Pignerol in
March, 1680. Lauzun was released the 22nd
of April, 1 68 1.

On the 1 2th of May, 1681, Louvois
announced to Saint-Mars that the King had
appointed him to the command of the fortress
of Exiles. On the 9th of June the Minister
wrote again, instructing Saint-Mars as to the
precautions to be observed respecting the
journey from Pignerol of those of his prisoners
who were to be removed.

" His Majesty's desire is, that as soon as
the room at Exiles, which you shall judge
the most proper for the safe keeping of the
two prisoners in the lower tower, shall be
ready to receive them, you send these prisoners
out of the citadel of Pignerol in a litter, and
conduct them there under the escort of your
troop . . . Immediately after the pri-
soners' departure, it is his Majesty's wish

278 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

that you proceed to Exiles, to take posses-
sion of the government, and to settle yourself
there."

Here were two prisoners to be removed.
A word follows concerning " the rest of the
prisoners now in your charge," which it will
be important to remember at the final stage
of the enquiry. " The Sieur de Chamoy,"
says Louvois, " has instructions to pay two
crowns a day for the maintenance of these
three prisoners." There were thus five
prisoners in Pignerol on the eve of the
departure of Saint- Mars for Exiles.

The prisoners to be removed were the two
prisoners of the lower tower. The lower
tower was, as we have seen, the prison of
Mattioli and the Jacobin monk : what more
natural, then, than to conclude that these
were the two whom Saint-Mars carried with
him to Exiles ? This was the obvious view
adopted by Roux-Fazillac, Delort, and all

INQUISITION OF JULES LOISELEUR. 281

investigators up to the time of Topin. Was
it the true one ?

In the course of years the climate of Exiles
affected the health of Saint-Mars ; and the
ever-obliging Louvois procured him a change
of government. Early in 1687 he was called
to the Isles of Sainte- Marguerite- Saint-
Honorat, in the Sea of Provence. To the
fortress of Sainte-Marguerite he took one
prisoner only. The date was the 30th of
April, 1687. Delort and the rest, determined
not to lose sight of their candidate for a
moment, declared that this " seul prisonnier "
must be Mattioli. No name was mentioned,
and definite proof was lacking ; but probability
favoured the conjecture.

Let us see how it is established that one
alone of the two prisoners brought from
Pignerol to Exiles was carried from Exiles
to the Isles. A few days before the close
of 1685 (December the 23rd), Saint-Mars

282 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

wrote to Louvois : " My prisoners are still
ill, and under medical treatment. They are,
however, perfectly tranquil." In the autumn
of the following year, one of the prisoners
was dropsical. "You ought to have told
me," writes Louvois, October 9th, 1686,
"which of your prisoners has become
dropsical." He writes again on the 3rd of
November : " It will be proper to let your
dropsical prisoner be confessed, when you
are certain that his end is near." In the
first days of January, 1687, the prisoner
died. " I have received your letter of the 5th
inst.," writes Louvois (January 13th, 1687),
"which informs me of the death of one of
your prisoners. I will say no more concern-
ing your desire for a change of govern-
ment, since you have already learned that
the King has been pleased to confer on you
a better post than the one you are in posses-
sion of." The death of one of the prisoners

INQUISITION OF JULES LOISELEUR. 283

brought by Saint-Mars from Pignerol to
Exiles is thus demonstrated. Was it Mattioli
or the other ? Delort and his contemporaries
concluded, positively for the most part, that
it was the other.

They overlooked, however, one fact of the
extremest significance. It was, that from the
date of this death at Exiles Mattioli s name
disappears entirely from the correspondence of
Louvois and Saint- Mars. Now there may
be nothing absolutely conclusive in this ; but,
taken with the testimony of the death, it
seems to plunge into hopeless uncertainty
every system which has sought to solve
through Mattioli the mystery of the Man in
the Mask. Such was the terribly destructive
criticism of Jules Loiseleur, in the Revue
Contemporaine* a criticism which demolishes
those systems in a fashion the most decisive.
If Mattioli and the monk were the two

* July 2 1 st, 1867.

284 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

prisoners whom Saint-Mars carried to Exiles
(and we have seen that their removal was
ordered by Louvois) ; if one of the pair died
of dropsy at Exiles in January, 1687 (and
the document in proof has been cited) ; and
if from this date Mattioli's name vanishes
from the letters of Louvois and Saint-Mars
— with what confidence may it be pretended
that Mattioli was the masked man borne in
secret by Saint-Mars to the Bastille in
September, 1698 ? " His demonstration,''
wrote a contemporary critic of Loiseleur, " at
once luminous and peremptory, has ex-
hausted the question ; and, in default of fresh
documents, no serious mind will ever return
to it." Topin confesses that after reading
and re-reading this demonstration,* he could
resolve no otherwise than that the secret of
the Mask was and would remain impenetrable.

* Refuted, nevertheless, by him in so far as concerned Loiseleur's
hypothesis of the arrest of the spy by Catinat.

*85

CHAPTER VII.

Comes the question then : has

The Missing . _ - . .

the Man in the Mask once more

Link

Revealed by and finally eluded us ? Let us go
a step further. Baudry had said
of the inquisition of Loiseleur, that it had
exhausted the problem ; that, if other docu-
ments were not forthcoming, no serious
mind would return to its consideration.
But it has been stated before, and the
statement must be repeated, that the whole
truth of this strange drama was not con-
tained in any single set of documents.
Louis XIV. was little likely to leave us the
epitome of it ; and no minister who had
part in the affair ever forgot the King's

286 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

command to d'Estrades : // faudra que
personne ne sfacke ce que cet homme sera
devenu, — No one must know what becomes
of this man. His very name had already
disappeared, save only for those few who
had known it from the first. At Pignerol,
he was Lestang ; in the Bastille, he was
the prisoner from Provence. Apart from
the brief but pregnant documents of the
Bastille, to be presented when their time
comes, his identity was only to be made
good by the comparison of innumerable
despatches, " not one among which furnishes
by itself an irrefutable proof, but which in
their entirety, with the logical deductions
that may be drawn from them, conduct to
an absolute certainty." *

But there could be no doubt that, after
Loiseleur, fresh documents were necessary,
if this certainty were ever to be attained.

* Topin.

A Corner of the Fort of Exiles.

THE MISSING LINK REVEALED. 289

These documents were found by Topin.
The passage in which he explains how
he first imagined their existence, and then
went on to prove it, is peculiarly interest-
ing, as showing both his extreme mental
ingenuity and the inexhaustible patience
with which he pursued a task now regarded
as well - nigh impossible of completion.
There comes first a letter, of which, at
sight, the significance is less than nothing :
a letter from Louvois to Saint- Mars, dated
January 5th, 1682. At this time Saint-
Mars has been but a few months at
Exiles ; but he is already clamouring for a
change of government, and has evidently
been sounding Louvois on the subject.
Louvois replies :

" I received your letter of the 28th ult.
You do not know where your interest lies,
when you propose to exchange the govern-
ment of Exiles against that of Casale, the

'9

290 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

value of which is only two thousand livres
a year.* I strongly advise you not to think
further of it."

There is no more in the despatch than
that. It suggests nothing but the interest
of Louvois in the personal fortunes of
Saint-Mars, whose sister-in law was the
minister's mistress. Saint-Mars, incessantly
grasping (and suffering in health at Exiles),
seeks another change of place : Louvois
responds that the change he proposes will
put nothing into his purse. It is the letter,
not of the minister to the gaoler, but of the
minister to his friend : it is a strictly per-
sonal communication. What, then, is its
value as a counterpoise to the criticism of
Loiseleur, which showed — upon the docu-
ments put in — that Mattioli, if he did
not die of dropsy at Exiles, did at all
events disappear incontinently from the des-

* The amount which Saint- Mars was receiving at Exiles.

THE MISSING LINK REVEALED. 291

patches which, up to this point, had been

almost solely occupied with him ?

The supposition is still, of course, that

Mattioli was one of the two prisoners whom

Saint-Mars carried with him from Pignerol

to Exiles. Just here, however, the doubt

comes in that suggested itself to Topin. If

Mattioli were with Saint-Mars at Exiles,

what more imprudent than that he should

propose to take him — an Italian subject

forcibly stolen from Italy — into an Italian

town, and a town Mantuan in its hereditary

interests ! If it were in any way possible

that Mattioli should discover himself to

friends, he would at least have a better

chance of doing so in Casale than at Exiles.

How did this not occur to Saint-Mars ?

And, if it missed the sleepless intelligence

of Saint-Mars, how came it also to be passed

by Louvois ? But Louvois evidently has not

a thought of danger. His sole motive in

19*

292 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

dissuading Saint-Mars from Casale is that
his pocket would profit nothing by the ex-
change. Mattioli, whom it would have been
unwise to carry back into Italy, is not so
much as mentioned. Then Mattioli, perhaps,
was not at Exiles at all, and had never
been sent there ? This was the inspiration
that Topin drew from the colourless despatch
of Louvois.

The chance of success in this direction
was a very feeble one ; for the despatch of
Louvois was extant, ordering the removal of
the two prisoners of the tour d' en das, the
lower tower, to which Mattioli and the monk
had been relegated ; and the despatch had
closed with the injunction that " the effects
belonging to the Sieur de Mattioli which
are in your possession are to be taken to
Exiles, so that they may be given back to
him, should his Majesty ever decide to set
the prisoner at liberty." This was categorical.

THE MISSING LINK REVEALED. 293

Still, Topin's doubts persisted. If Mattioli
were indeed at Exiles, how could Saint-Mars
propose to transfer him to Casale ? And
how did Louvois let that proposal pass un-
rebuked ? With these questions pricking him,
Topin returned to the Bibliotheque Imperiale
to begin the search anew — and the missing
link revealed itself.

It was found in a letter from Saint-Mars
to d'Estrades, bearing date June 25th, 1681.
Saint- Mars, the least gregarious of men, had
sworn an ardent friendship with the Abbe,
and he hastens to share with him the news
of his appointment to Exiles. " Count on
me as your most devoted. I received yesterday
the warrant appointing me to the governor-
ship of Exiles, at a salary of two thousand
livres. . . . I am to take with me two

jail-birds * whom I have here

Mattioli remains where he is, with two other

* " Deux merles."

294 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

prisoners. One of my lieutenants, named
Villebois, will have charge of them."

Mattioli, therefore, was not the prisoner
who died at Exiles in January, 1687. He
never went to Exiles at all. The purpose
indicated in Louvois's despatch, of the 9th
of June, 1 68 1, had been abandoned; and
Mattioli remained at Pignerol, where he will
be found in the keeping of Villebois. The
long silence of Louvois and Saint-Mars
concerning him thus receives its natural
explanation.

The perplexity, the scepticism which Loise-
leur's examination had produced, vanished
upon this discovery. Mattioli was at Pignerol
and at the Isles and in the Bastille ; Delort's
error, which for a time cast into uncertainty
the whole history of the Mask, lay in re-
moving him from Pignerol to Exiles. There
are two traits or characters in the history
of the Mask which attach themselves to

THE MISSING LINK REVEALED. 295

Mattioli alone, of all the prisoners whom
Saint-Mars had in his keeping : the unvarying
tradition of his detention at Sainte-Marguerite,
and the documental certainty of his detention
at Pignerol. In Du Junca's journal, the
prisoner whom Saint-Mars brings to the
Bastille in September, 1698, is an ancient
prisoner whom he had at Pignerol. Exiles
finds no place in the entry. We know that
Saint-Mars had Mattioli in his charge during
two years at Pignerol, and Topin has shown
that the prisoner was not transferred to
Exiles. But for that unfortunate error, which
is principally identified with Delort, the pro-
blem might long since have been resolved.

296

CHAPTER VI I.

Most visitors to the Riviera have

The

prisoner of ma de the little trip to the Isles
consequence. of Sainte - Marguerite and Saint-
Honorat, enticed by the piquant legend of
the Man in the Iron Mask. A good woman
discovers you his cell, charms you and thrills
you with stories of his fine apparel, his
plate, and the deference shown him by Saint-
Mars : poor Mask, who had no fine clothes
and no plate, and whom the deferential
gaoler had threatened with a cudgel ! The
Isles owe most of their celebrity to what is
purely fabulous in this history, but they have
other annals also.

Lying some fifteen hundred yards from the
shore, the two islands, of which Sainte-

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 297

Marguerite is the larger, are as sentinels over
the pleasure-haunts of Nice, Cannes, and San
Remo. Rock and reef lend some amount of
danger to the approach. Within, the Isles
are dark with pine trees, cumbered and
strengthened with shaggy hills, gigantic
boulders. Climbing Sainte-Marguerite's top,
the traveller's eyes are filled with a marvellous
golden light ; before him undulates on either
hand all that sun-bathed shore of the Riviera ;
he counts the glistening villas of Cannes ;
grey-green hills of olive rise beyond ; to the
left streams out the long chain of the Esterel,
" with contours brusque and varied " ; and on

the right the Maritime Alps cast up their
"thousand years of snow."

The Romans were here once ; hermits have
dwelt in these island solitudes; the Saracens
have invaded and the Spaniards have sacked
them. * In the dawn of the fifth century

* Topin.

298 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Saint- Honorat founded here a monastery,
greatly celebrated of the Gauls, where "thou-
sands of apostles " practised virtue and the
monkish arts. On the smaller island is
still shown the well which the saint created,
yielding a miraculous sweet water. Here
came Francis I., prisoner of the Spaniards
after the disastrous field of Pavia, to endure a
harsh captivity. Here,, to Sainte- Marguerite,
was sent, in December, 1873, . Marshal
Bazaine, who broke prison and escaped the
night of the 9th of August, 1874. The two
islands bear the common name of the lies de
Lerins. The memory of the Iron Mask,
whose prison was the fortress of Sainte-
Marguerite, has conferred on the Lerins a
celebrity which seems likely to endure.

Hither, then, came, in 1687, the most incor-
ruptible gaoler, Saint-Mars. He had received
word of his new appointment on the 20th of
January ; he was in ill-health, and eager for

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 299

the healing South. He wrote to Louvois : —
" I am most grateful for the new favour which
his Majesty has just bestowed on me (the
Government of the Isles of Sainte-Mar-
guerite). If you order me to proceed there
without delay, I would request to be allowed
to take the road through Piedmont, on account
of the great quantity of snow that lies between
this place and Embrun." He went to Sainte-
Marguerite in February, and was twenty-six
days in bed, " with a continual fever."

Mattioli, this while, supposed at Exiles, lay
close in Pignerol. We have glimpses of the
guard that was kept upon him. Villebois,
chained to his prisoner, seems never to have
been allowed to leave the dungeon. In such
a nervous fit as Saint-Mars was almost inces-
santly a prey to, he wrote to Louvois, asking
to whom he should entrust the prisoner,
supposing he were incapacitated by sickness ;
and Louvois replied : " To the person you can

300 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

most rely on." Even the priest of the prison
was distrusted — " Your prisoners are to be
confessed only once a year." Books of
devotion might be given to them ; but " you
are to take care they do not use them for
passing notes to one another." One night
someone is . suspected of haunting a bastion
gate of Pignerol, and Villebois is instructed to
" do your utmost to discover who the person
was." There is a rare effort of Mattioli — the
only one that records prove — to disclose his
situation : he writes something on a lining
torn from his pocket. It is discovered, and
communicated to Versailles, and the answer is
returned- — "You must burn any scraps on
which Mattioli has written." The walls of
Pignerol, and the road beneath, were strictly
watched ; the sentinels had orders to let no
one linger about the gates.

Saint-Mars, on his part, while at Exiles,
had enjoyed a measure of liberty that he

-3

■
Si

6

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 303

had never known when guarding Mattioli
at Pignerol. He went on little visits to
d'Estrades, to Catinat ; he paid his court
to the Duke of Savoy ; he was allowed
from time to time to sleep out of the gaol.
" Madame de Saint- Mars having told me,"
writes Louvois, in March, 1685, "that you
wish to go to the baths of Aix-en-Savoie,
I spoke about it to the King, and his
Majesty commands me to say that you may
absent yourself from Exiles for that purpose
for a period of from fifteen days to three
weeks." Even at the Isles, at first, Saint-
Mars was comparatively at his ease. u The
King consents to your taking a holiday two
days in the month, and permits you to return
the visit of the governor of Nice." These
were the relaxations of the period when Saint-
Mars had charge only of "two jail-birds."

On a sudden, the 26th of February, 1694,
there is a mandate from Versailles, inform-

304 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

ing the commandant that three prisoners
of State are to be sent from Pignerol to
the Isles. The minister* enquires "if there
are safe places to hold them," and bids
the governor make all needful dispositions
to receive them. A second letter, March
the 20th, contains a passage of capital
significance: "You know in effect that they
are of greater consequence, at least one,
than the prisoners now at the Isles ; and,
preferably to those others, you should see
that they are lodged in the most secure
quarter of the prison. The courier who
bears this despatch takes with him also
fifteen hundred livres for preliminary ex-
penses."

Thus was announced the coming of
Mattioli, with the two remaining prisoners
of Pignerol.

* This was Barbezieux, the successor of Louvois, who died
in 1691.

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 305

The great Louis, who took his vengeances
cruelly, was falling on his evil days. The
disruption was beginning which should end in
the cataract of the Revolution. In Italy
the situation had been sadly modified since
the epoch at which Louis had first sought
to treat as autocrat for the purchase of
Casale. He no longer spoke there with a
master's voice ; " his arms had ceased to
be ever-victorious, and he was already
expiating his impolitic and inopportune
intervention in the affairs of the Peninsula "
Casale must be abandoned ; Pignerol, too —
that " precious acquisition of Richelieu,"
which had been practically a French town
for sixty years.

Mattioli in the heart of his dungeon felt
the effects of the King's reverses. The
restoration of Pignerol by Louis explains
his removal to the Isles. Once more, how-
ever, a deep secrecy falls upon him ; he is

20

306 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

never at this time alluded to by name in
the despatches. " Now more than ever,
in a word, was it imperative to hide
from the sight and knowledge of all, this
victim of an audacious and inexcusable
violation of the rights of men. Europe's
discontent with Louis XIV. was extreme ;
his interest lay in appeasing this discontent ;
and in these circumstances it was of the last
importance to cover with an impenetrable
mystery an existence which recalled at once
the dangerous ambition, the audacity, and —
not less than these — the humbling of a great
king."

Never, accordingly, were such extra-
ordinary precautions taken for a journey of
this nature. The Marquis d'Herleville,
governing the citadel of Pignerol, and the
Comte de Tesse, commanding the French
troops in that place, had orders " to furnish
the escort, and the monies necessary for

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 307

the expenses of the road " ; and it was
strictly enjoined upon de Tesse " that he
should not seek to know the names of the
prisoners." A strong escort was provided ;
two sure guides were sent in advance ; and
the governor of the dungeon of Pignerol
went with the litter of the prisoners, with
instructions to let no one but himself
attend on them. Thus they came mys-
teriously to the Isles. /

In that litter so closely escorted, three
prisoners fared, one of whom was of greater
consequence than the others. Now, after the
death of Fouquet and the release of Lauzun,
there was not at Pignerol any considerable
prisoner save Mattioli. Note, too, that when
Saint-Mars went to Exiles, it was to
Villebois that the charge of Mattioli was
assigned — Villebois, who had shared with
Catinat the mission of arresting him : further.

that on the death of Villebois, it was another

20*

3 o8 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

of Saint- Mars's lieutenants, Laprade, who
was sent from the Isles as governor of
the dungeon of Pignerol. Saint-Mars had
therefore not lost sight of his ancient
prisoner ; he had been in touch with him
throughout. At Exiles, and during the
first period of his command at the Isles,
Saint-Mars, with the King's permission,
had quitted his charge when it pleased him :
there comes from Pignerol this prisoner of
consequence, and Saint-Mars leaves the
Isles no more. " From this moment," says
Topin, " Saint-Mars never stirs from his
prison." At this time, too, Barbezieux, who
has not until now displayed the least
anxiety, is solicitous of knowing what would
befall at the Isles should sickness overtake
Saint-Mars. New measures of precaution
are proposed by Saint- Mars, and approved
by the minister. The bolts from the
dungeon of Pignerol are sent to Sainte-

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 309

Marguerite. Time does not weaken this
scrupulous watch, as appears by the follow-
ing significant despatch from Versailles,
November 17th, 1697: —

" I have received with your letter of the
10th of this month the copy of the one
written you by Mons. de Ponchartrain con-
cerning the prisoners who are at the Isles of
Sainte-Marguerite, in accordance with the
King's orders, signed by him or by the late
Mons. de Seignelay. You have simply to
address yourself to the safe keeping of all
the persons entrusted to you, and to see
that no one ever learns what your ancient
prisoner has done."

Can the words " your ancient prisoner "
bear any meaning save one : a prisoner who
was formerly in your keeping and who has
again been confided to you ? The phrase
could not possibly apply to the prisoner
whom Saint-Mars had brought to the Isles,

310 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

for he arrived there in 1687, and it was
scarcely to be supposed that at the end of
ten years the inhabitants of Sainte-Marguerite
had grown suddenly curious as to the cause
of his detention. But their curiosity was
natural enough in respect of the three who
had arrived in the midst of that formidable
escort, for whose reception extensive pre-
parations had been made, and one at least
of whom had been lodged in the strongest
part of the prison.

The passage from Topin which follows
seems definitely to clinch the argument : —

" Pignerol was given up to the Duke of
Savoy shortly after the arrival of the new
prisoners at the Isles. I have searched
during the ten years (1698- 1708) which fol-
lowed the departure of Saint-Mars for the
Bastille, all the despatches exchanged be-
tween Lamothe-Guerin, his successor at the
Isles, and the Court of Versailles. The

PRISONER OF CONSEQUENCE. 311

name of Mattioli is nowhere to be found in
them, nor is there mention of any prisoner
of importance left behind by Saint- Mars."

We know that Mattioli was at Pignerol at
the end of 1693 (only a few months before
the removal of the three prisoners), for it
was in December of that year — the 27th —
that the minister was in communication with
Laprade about the prisoner's attempt to write
something on the lining of his clothes. The
three who were transferred in 1694 were all
old prisoners of Saint- Mars, and Mattioli
alone among them possessed any considera-
tion. When, therefore, Saint-Mars is strictly
bidden to keep from everyone the know-
ledge of " what your ancient prisoner has
done," there is but one conclusion to draw
— that the reference is to the affair which
Versailles continued to call " the treason of
Count Mattioli."

312

CHAPTER IX.

Both at the Isles and in the

The

SiIver Bastille, the life of Mattioli — if
Dish • life it may be called — seems to
have been as wretched, as inexpressibly
blank, as in the dungeon of Pignerol.
The despatches say nothing more of mad-
ness ; but, by the time he came to the
Isles, Mattioli had suffered during fifteen
years a form of captivity which might have
shattered, and which must certainly have
enfeebled, the very strongest intellect. One
of the most grievous pains of imprisonment
under the old regime must have been the
total lack of profitable or engaging employ-
ment. The tasks of prison, during a long

THE SILVER DISH. 313

sentence of penal servitude, are seldom
cheerful, and cannot but be monotonous ; but
they do at least fill the greater portion of
the convict's life, they stay his mind from
too much brooding, and they offer to in-
dustry a means of climbing from an inferior
to a higher class. But the prisoners of State
under the French monarchy had no tasks,
and could only with difficulty create their
occupations or their recreations. And the
history of Mattioli is desolate above the
average. If his mind were not dead within
him, his existence during all those years is
terrible to contemplate. Guiding ourselves
solely by the light of proved despatches, re-
jecting absolutely all such evidence as will
not stand that test, we find scarcely a trace
of solace or relief in that protracted martyr-
dom. A few " books of devotion," grudg-
ingly doled out ; the yearly visit of a priest :
that is all. In this respect, as in others,

314 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

the history of Mattioli is nearly without a
parallel. Of how many prisoners of State
is it recorded that, during a captivity of
years, they neither found nor were granted
any means of softening the unutterable soli-
tude of prison ? Fouquet read and wrote ;
procured herbs and plants from the hills, and
dabbled in pharmacy ; and was at last united
to his family. Mirabeau in Vincennes com-
posed that devastating essay on Lettres de
Cachet which foreshadowed the Revolution.
Conde cultivated pinks. Cardinal de Retz
played chess, and received his friends.
Trenck carved scrolls and mottoes on his cups.
Voltaire polished verses. Pellisson's spider
is famed. Latude and others tamed pigeons,
rats, and mice. Bunyan and Cervantes found
an immortality in the dungeon. The annals
of the Bastille embrace one dainty love affair,
that of Mdlle. de Launay (the Madame de
Staal that should be) and the young Chevalier

THE SILVER DISH. 315

de Menil. Diderot in Vincennes received
the visits of Rousseau and D'Alembert, and
talked Plato and Socrates with them in the
garden. In days near our own, Louis
Napoleon called the fortress of Ham his
University. Even in the prisons of Russia,
within the stretch of recent memory, prisoners
of both sexes have contrived to communicate
freely by means of a pre-arranged code of
raps.

But between Mattioli and all the living,
the gulf is absolute. Four-and-twenty years
revolve for him in a silence almost un-
broken. Intellect and the " life of life in
the heart " must staunch and be swallowed
up in that appalling and incredible sterility
of existence. Time scarcely modifies in any
degree the pitiless character of his captivity.
During four-and-twenty years he seems not
to have seen one friendly face ; and it is
almost certain that not a message ever

316 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

reached him from the world which he had
lost.

One day in those loathed seats was the
pattern of all. Saint-Mars has left us in a
letter to Barbezieux a precise account of the
manner in which, when he was ill or other-
wise engaged, his lieutenants waited on the
prisoners : —

" The first of my lieutenants,

who takes the keys of the prison ot my
ancient prisoner, with whom we commence,
opens the three doors and goes in. The
prisoner politely hands him the plates and
dishes, laid one on another, and the lieutenant
has only to pass through two doors to give
them to one of my sergeants, who places them
on a table two steps away, where is the second
lieutenant, who examines everything that
comes into and goes out of the prison, and
sees that nothing has been written on any
of the vessels. After they have given him

THE SILVER DISH. 317

the utensil, they make a thorough examina-
tion of the bed, then of the gratings and
windows of the room ; and very often the
prisoner himself is searched. After enquiring
civilly whether he wants anything, they lock
the doors, and visit the other prisoners in
like manner."

The " ancient prisoner," Mattioli, is here
in the strictest solitary confinement, and it
is evident that these perfunctory visits of
Saint-Mars or his lieutenant — with the
humiliating accompaniment of the daily search
— represent his sole intercourse with his
fellow-men. An existence so barren, so
deadly drear, as that of a Mattioli or a
Prisoner of Chillon, may be a fit theme for
tragic poetry, but is of little service to the
makers of romance. Fable accordingly has
always been extremely busy with this prisoner
of Saint-Mars, who was for generations the
most mysterious creature in history. Things

3i8 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

true or partly true of other prisoners have
grouped themselves around his memory ;
other things speak only for the imagination
of their inventors. The legend of the silver
dish (which includes Papon's variation) be-
longs to the period of Sainte-Marguerite.
Already referred to, it has a foundation in
fact, but does not touch the history of the
Mask. The revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, in 1685, had filled the prisons of
Louis XIV. with those French Protestants
and their clergy who had not fled the
country; and many ministers of the proscribed
faith were sent from time to time to Sainte-
Marguerite. It was through one of these
prisoners for his faith that the tale of the
" silver dish " arose. A certain Salves, un-
known to history in any other relation, is the
source it traces from. Along with a com-
panion unnamed, Salves fell in trouble with
Saint-Mars, who, in accordance with his

THE SILVER DISH. 3 '9

invariable rule, posted the matter to Ver-
sailles. Nothing escaped Saint-Mars ; for
what he did not see his lieutenants did not
dare to withhold from him ; and all went in
detail to the King.

" The first of the Protestant ministers who
have been sent here," he wrote (June 4th,
1692), " sings psalms night and day at the
top of his voice, to let it be known who and
what he is. I forbade him several times, on
pain of punishment ; and I have had to
punish him at last. I have taken a similar
course with his comrade Salves, who has a
mania for scribbling, and who has written
things on his pewter vessels and on his linen,
to publish it that he is imprisoned unjustly
for his religion."

Out of this petty memorandum from the
gaoler to the minister two writers have
furnished the most sensational incident in
the legend of the Iron Mask. Voltaire's

3 2o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

fisherman came off with his life, it is true :
Pere Papon's monk did not ; and there are
so few points at which the memory of
Saint-Mars makes appeal to us that it is
grateful to spare him the charge of that
imaginary murder.

With the story of the silver dish is linked,
in the popular fancy, the story of the laces
and fine linen. There is not a hint of
this in the despatches, and nothing that
Saint-Mars omits to mention is to be
received ; for he is little less than childish
in his incessant appeals to Versailles on
every point that concerns even the obscurest
of his prisoners. It is a corollary of Voltaire's
libel on Anne of Austria, but it has not the
basis even of that remote history of the silver
dish. A solitary figment of Voltaire, it goes
with the rest of his invention. The first
order of Louis XIV. will be remembered, that
Mattioli should have nothing " except the

THE SILVER DISH. 321

absolute necessaries of life " — among which
it is improbable that either Louis or Louvois
would include the frills and laces of the age.

Point by point, what is legendary in the
record of the Mask gives place to history.
Tradition has found him with a guitar, and
old prints depict it ; but every picture of
the Man in the Mask is a fantasy, and
no guitar passed unsanctioned into any
prison of Saint- Mars.

To the fifteen disintegrating years in
Pignerol were joined four at the Isles of
Sainte-Marguerite ; day yielding ever to
night in the prisoner's life through all that
tragic cycle. And fate had not yet done
with him.

2 1

3 22

CHAPTER X.

On the first of March, 1698,
Saint-Mars received from Versailles

comes

to the the offer of the government of
the Bastille. The salary was rich,
the office one of trust and dignity, and
Paris was Paris : Saint-Mars accepted the
offer at once. Nothing further passed until
the 17th of June, when Barbezieux wrote
again from Versailles : —

" I have been long in answering your
letter of the 8th of last month, as the King
had not explained his intentions to me. I
am now to inform you that his Majesty
is pleased at your acceptance of the govern-
ment of the Bastille. You can have
everything in train to be ready to start

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 323

when you receive the final word ; and
bring with you in all security your ancient
prisoner.

" I have arranged with Mons. Saumery
to give you two thousand crowns for the
transport of your effects. "

On the 19th of July there came a third
despatch from Barbezieux, confirming what
had gone before, and emphasising the
importance of guarding the prisoner on the
journey " in such a manner that he shall
be seen by no one." Two months later,
in the middle of September, when the days
were shortening, Saint-Mars set out with
him to traverse the whole of France. At
this point the reflection arises that had the
affair of the Mask been a scandal of the
Court, and the prisoner a person whose
features revealed a royal origin, it would
have been strangely and curiously impru-
dent to bring him to a dungeon in the

21*

324 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

heart of Paris — where chance might so much
more easily discover him than in that dis-
tant fastness lapped by the Sea of Provence-
There could be no grave reason why the
Italian Mattioli should not be carried to
the Bastille ; there was every prudent reason
of State why a brother of the King should
not be carried there. But, as we shall
see, it was unquestionably the Man in
the Mask who made the journey with Saint-
Mars.

A glance at the map of France will show
what a journey this was at the jog-trot
pace of the litter. No detailed itinerary
exists, but we know where the principal halt
was made. In the central department of
Yonne is the town of Villeneuve-le-Roi, once
called the Ante-room of the Popes, now
desolate and lifeless. Near Villeneuve is the
chateau of Palteau, a property belonging to
Saint-Mars, and here he halted with his

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 327

prisoner. * Reference has been made in the
Introduction to the letter of M. de For-
manoir de Palteau, grand-nephew of Saint-
Mars, in which this episode is described.
The letter, bearing date June 19, 1768, was

* Saint-Mars was not the man to loiter on the road, with a prisoner
of State in his keeping, and it is unlikely that the stay at Palteau ex-
ceeded a night or two. But wherever the Masked Man came legend
laid hold upon his memory, and Villeneuve-le-Roi has appropriated
him. There is in Villeneuve a vast old ruined fort, with castellated
drum-towers, and cells and chambers in abundance. Now Saint-Mars
and the Mask would probably take Villeneuve on their way to Palteau ;
at all events, that close-guarded litter, watched with an awful wonder
from Provence to Paris, must have passed very near. What more apt
than to imagine for the Mask a period of captivity in the fort of Vil-
leneuve-le-Roi ! It has been done. In a pleasant volume of wander-
ings, " In the Rhone Valley , " Mr. Charles W. Wood tells how he was
shown the cell by a nun, as her piece de resistance. " Most interesting
of all was a small remote doorway, and the nun looked wonderfully
picturesque as she bent down and applied the key to the lock, her black
graceful dress standing out in strange contrast with the ancient and
splendid masonry. Then she threw open the door and we entered a
dark circular chamber that was half cell. In tones that thrilled her
hearers and echoed in the roof, she said : ' This is the room in
which the Man with the Iron Mask was confined, before he was
taken to another and more open part of the fort.'" Mr. Wood,
accepting the statement in good faith, adds: "We almost felt on
sacred ground."

328 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

addressed to Freron, of the Annee Litt'eraire,
and published in the issue of June 30.

" In 1698, " writes M. de Palteau, " M. de
Saint-Mars passed from the charge of the
Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to that of the
Bastille. On his way, he stayed with his
prisoner on his estate at Palteau. The Man
in the Mask came in a litter which preceded
that of M. de Saint-Mars ; they were
accompanied by several men on horseback.
The peasants went to greet their lord ;
M. de Saint-Mars took his meals with his
prisoner, who was placed with his back to
the windows of the dining-room which over-
looked the courtyard. The peasants whom
I questioned could not see whether he wore
his mask while eating, but they took note of
the fact that M. de Saint-Mars, who sat
opposite to him, kept a pair of pistols beside
his plate. They were waited on by one
man-servant, who fetched the dishes from

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 329

the ante-room where they were brought to
him, taking care to close behind him the
door of the dining-room. When the prisoner
crossed the courtyard, he aways wore the
black mask ; the peasants noticed that his
teeth and lips showed through it ; * also
that he was tall and had white hair. M. de
Saint-Mars slept in a bed close to that of the
masked man."

There could be nothing simpler than this
statement. The writer has no hypothesis of
his own, and no leaning towards any other
hypothesis. He is content to report what he
had learned by word of mouth from the old
people on the estate who had actually seen the
prisoner in the mask at Palteau.f The detail
of chief importance in the account is the mask ;

* Clearly, the little velvet half-mask which may be seen to-day at
any bal masque in Carnival.

t The chateau of Palteau still stands where it did. The dining-hall
in which Saint-Mars faced his prisoner, with pistols by his side, is
now, says M. Funck-Brentano, a kitchen.

33o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

and this is verified by the entry in Du Junca's
journal, when the veiled prisoner arrives at the
Bastille. We have kept touch of this prisoner
so far, and have found under his velvet mask
no features but those of Mattioli. A prisoner
of particular consequence is transferred from
Pignerolto the Isles, and at the date of his
removal there is only Mattioli of consequence
in that prison. His name ceases, but he is
identified with the "ancient prisoner" of sub-
sequent despatches. This " ancient prisoner "
is the one whom Saint-Mars is instructed to
carry from the Isles to the Bastille. The
prisoner alights at Palteau, and it is observed
by the peasants on the estate that he wears a
mask. The journey ends at the Bastille ; and
Du Junca, the King's Lieutenant of the prison,
notes in his journal that the prisoner whom
Saint-Mars brings from the Isles is an ancient
prisoner whom he had at Pignerol, and that
he is masked. Even in the Paris of that day

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 331

the use of the mask was not unknown ; but
there is absolutely no other instance in French
history of its employment to conceal the
identity of a prisoner : hence the naive wonder
which may be read between the lines of
Du Junca's entry.

This note in the register or journal kept by
the King's Lieutenant of the Bastille is, as
M. Funck-Brentano observes, " the origin and
foundation of all that has been printed on the
question of the Iron Mask." The journal itself
(the original is in the Arsenal Library) is the
work of an unlettered official who spells
atrociously, and knows nothing of punctua-
tion. When a new prisoner was received
Du Junca wrote down the particulars of his
coming, and the first of the entries with which
this history is concerned is as follows, in a
translation as literal as possible.

" On Thursday, 18th September (1698), at
three in the afternoon, M. de Saint-Mars, go-

LP

332 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

vernor of the chateau of the Bastille, presented
himself for the first time, coming from his
government of the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite-
Honorat, having with him in his litter a pri-
soner who was formerly in his keeping at Pig-
nerol, whom he caused to be always masked,
whose name is not mentioned : on descending
from the litter, he had him placed in the first
chamber of the Baziniere tower, waiting until
night for me to take him, at nine o'clock, and
put him with M. de Rosarges, one of the ser-
geants brought by the governor, alone in the
third chamber of the Bertaudiere tower, which
I had had duly furnished some days before his
arrival, by order of M. de Saint-Mars : the
aforesaid prisoner will be served and seen to
by M. de Rosarges, and maintained by the
overnor."

Such is the famous entry which records the
coming of the Mask to the Bastille. He
passed in there as mysteriously as he had

r

bjM*

°XL-

y? Jaj<ms~

\ogt{v-~- le?*

Entry in the Register of the Bastille.

By the courtesy of Messrs. Downey and Co.

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 335

entered Pignerol nineteen years earlier, and
the Isles in 1694. That the staff of the Bastille
had not the least idea who he was is rendered
certain by the names he received from them.
He was " the Prisoner from Provence," most
often ; sometimes " the ancient prisoner " —
the term so closely identified with Mattioli.
It is clear that at first his isolation was
as rigorous as it had ever been. Rosarges
alone waited on him. No fellow-prisoner
shared his captivity in the third chamber
of the Bertaudiere tower. What tales
would filter through the Bastille, what
fables would begin to grow around him,
even while he sat there — the unknown who
wore the mask !

But time was passing even for the Man
in the Mask. Casale was no longer
French ; the negotiations which had issued
so fatefully for Mattioli were old history ;
the whole affair was out of mind : its

336 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

importance had utterly ceased. Note how
this affected the Mask in 1701, twenty-two
years after he had been thrown into Pignerol.
No pardon came for him, nor was he granted
the ease in his dungeon which was allowed
at last to Fouquet. His fate was infinitely
more pitiful ; he fell from his estate in the
prison, he was degraded among the com-
monest of the Bastille's inmates.

He had been confined in the third chamber
of the Bertaudiere tower. From this he was
removed, the 6th of March, 1701, to make
room for one Anne Randon, " devineresse
et diseuse de bonne fortune," witch and for-
tune-teller : the Man in the Mask displaced
by a common sorceress ! He was then put
by Du Junca, whose Journal is the authority,
into " the second Bertaudiere," which he
shared with a certain Thirmont or Tirmont.
This man, embastilled in July, 1700, had
been a domestic servant ; he was only nine-

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 337

teen years of age, and had been accused of
atheism and black magic, and of corrupting
young girls : quite an ordinary type of the
rogue and charlatan of the age. Some six
weeks later these two were joined by a
third prisoner. The entry is in Du Junca's
Journal. " Saturday, April 30, at about nine
in the evening, M. Aumont the younger
came, bringing with him and handing over
to us a prisoner named M. Maranville, but
calling himself Ricarville, formerly an officer
in the army, a malcontent, a tattler, and a
rake ; whom I received by the King's orders,
sent through the Comte de Pontchartrain,
and placed with the man Tirmont, in the
second chamber of the Bertaudiere tower,
along with the ancient prisoner, both being
under lock and key."

The Bastille of this date held accommo-
dation for no more than forty-two prisoners,

separately confined. In 1701 it was exces-

22

338 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

sively full, and three prisoners were locked
into one chamber : the servant Tirmont ;
Maranville alias Ricarville, whom the police re-
port described as " of a beggarly appearance " ;
and the Man in the Mask. In October, 1708,
Maranville was sent from the Bastille to
Charenton prison, where he died. Tirmont
was transferred in December, 1701, to the
horrible Bicetre, half-prison, half-madhouse.
He became insane two years later, and died
in 1709.

Now, for a moment, let this situation of
the Mask, cheek by jowl with this sorry
pair, be considered in the light of the
Legend. It is an awkward situation for the
Legend ! The prisoner has been immured
twenty-two years, in a seclusion the strictest
and most cruel, his name and his identity
withheld from everyone, for the reason that he
is the depository of some tremendous secret
of the State. He has been hidden under a

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 339

mask all this time, because, forsooth, if he
were not so disguised, he would be recog-
nised as the brother of Louis XIV. And lo !
this holder of the dread secret, this royal
twin or bastard who so fatally resembles the
King, is suddenly sent to keep company with
two gaol-birds of the Bastille. The prison
becomes crowded, a lady in trouble for
telling fortunes is among the new arrivals ;
and of so much greater consequence is she
than this redoubtable prisoner who has been
under seal for two-and-twenty years, that his
room in the Bertaudiere is immediately
assigned to her. The fortune-teller has the
dignity of a separate chamber ; the Mask is
thrust in with the lackey Tirmont, and
Maranville presently makes a third. The
two common fellows are bye-and-bye moved
from the Bastille — having had the fullest op-
portunity of learning and disseminating that
stupendous secret. This is not a little curious

34o THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

— considered in the light of the Legend.
What, indeed, becomes of the Legend ?

But if the reader is with us in this inquiry,
with Delort and Topin and M. Funck-
Brentano, this decline in importance of the
prisoner who had hitherto been all-important
has already received its explanation. With
the lapse of time, the man and the political
intrigue he had been concerned in had quite
ceased to be of consequence to anybody.
Mattioli had no secret to reveal. Should
he divulge the affair of Casale ? No one at
that date would have been a penny the
worse. Should he speak of his long and
torturing captivity ? Alas ! captivities as harsh
as his were none so rare at that era : pity
indeed the tale might excite ; it could excite
no extreme degree of wonder. In fine, at
the epoch of 1701 the prisoner of the Mask
had nothing to communicate which could
disturb for an instant the repose of Ver-

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 341

sailles ; — and they suffered him to sink to the
level of those vulgar delinquents who passed
in and out of the Bastille.

This fact, which we owe to M. Funck-
Brentano's scrutiny of the Journal of Du
Junca, disposes of the interesting tale that,
after the prisoner's death, everything in his
room was burned, " linen, clothes, cushions and
counterpanes " ; the flooring taken up and
the walls scraped and whitewashed again.
We have just seen his room in the occu-
pation of the adventuress Randon, which
would be upon the order of Saint-Mars ;
and that heedful man is not at all concerned
to know whether his prisoner — who may
henceforth be shifted anywhere — has left
behind him any trace of his identity. Were
this anything but fiction, it would be found
in Du Junca. He is a Pepys in minuteness
whenever he finds matter for his pen ; his
details of the prisoner's death in 1703 are

342 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

precise, but he has nothing else to tell.
If, after the prisoner's death, his cell had been
even whitewashed, we should have learned
it from Du Junca, who wrote everything that
came to his knowledge, but with no more
notion than Pepys that he was writing for
posterity. The story, in fact, traces, through
Pere Griffet, to a Major of the Bastille,
Chevalier by name, who did not come upon
the scene until 1749. For many years it was
accepted, but it vanishes in the search-light
of M. Funck-Brentano, and is now but an
item of the Legend. It is self-evident that
there was no motive for destroying the traces
of a prisoner who, two years before his death,
had been given ample opportunity to reveal
himself, and who was thenceforth insignificant.
This tragedy was now very near its closing
scene. So far as records are concerned, the
two remaining years are blank ; and the
imagination does not willingly attempt to

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 343

re-create them. For the spectacle of the
Mask degraded from his eminence of mystery
cast unregarded among the coarser tenants
of his dungeon, affects the mind, perhaps,
even more painfully than the vision of him,
solitary in his Alpine cell, or vainly inter-
rogating the waters of the Isles ; narrowly
surveyed, the veritable prisoner of State.
Hope must have fled him for years ; we do
not find him petitioning Louis, or appealing
to Charles of Mantua : he sat " with close-
lipped patience," or, if patience had not found
him, it were better to know nothing of what
passed within that lonely brain.

Under date of the 19th of November,
1703, Du Junca wrote, in the Register which
he reserved for entries of the death or
liberation of prisoners of the Bastille * : —

"The same day, November 19th, 1703, the
prisoner unknown, masked always with a

* The translation is as literal as is possible.

344 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

mask of black velvet, whom M. de Saint-
Mars, the governor, brought with him from
the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite, and whom he
had had for a long time, happening to be
rather unwell yesterday on coming from mass,
died this day at about ten o'clock in the
evening, without having had any serious
illness ; indeed it could not have been slighter.
M. Giraut, our chaplain, confessed him yes-
terday, and is surprised at his death. He
did not receive the sacrament, and our
chaplain exhorted him a moment before he
died. And this unknown prisoner, confined
so long a time, was buried on Tuesday at
four in the afternoon, in the cemetery of
St. Paul, our parish ; on the register of
burial he was given a name also unknown.
M. de Rosarges, major, and Arreil, surgeon,
signed the register."

A marginal note to the left of the entry
ran as follows : —

~jv.i>^w/ &&$ Hoc* <fhuy

if 7tef?wri4: nwiu-pU. &srf*c^
. T7V0 7nm4r a^u^vd f/usfc. ******

,$771.

71*4.

•<nvQ^$- 7 g»<QcnL>ru_ ,iptl tz^ttl- a*Ayfac67i*>

Entry in the Register of Saint Paul's.

By the courtesy of Messrs. Downey and Co.

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 347

" I have since learnt that he was named
on the register M. de Marchiel, and that the
burial cost 40 livres."

The entry in the register of Saint Paul's,
discovered later, reads : —

"On the 19th (1703) Marchioly, aged
forty-five or thereabouts, died in the Bastille,
whose body was buried in the churchyard
of St Paul, his parish, the 20th of this
month, in the presence of M. Rosage (sic),
major of the Bastille, and M. Reglhe (sic)
surgeon major of the Bastille, who signed.—
" Signed : Rosarges, Reilhe."

The written names in the entry are
examples of the slovenly, inaccurate spelling
of the age. The person who sets them
down is ignorant even of the names of the
two officers of the Bastille by whom his
register is signed : Rosarges is " Rosage,"

348 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

Reilhe is " Reglhe." " Marchioly " is re-
markably close to Mattioli when it is re-
membered that Saint-Mars would probably
have given the name by word of mouth ;
it is still closer if he spoke it, as he often
wrote it in his despatches — " Martioly " in-
stead of Mattioli. In the despatches of
Louvois it is sometimes " Marthioly," which,
with the difference of a letter, is the name
on the register. In others, it is " Matioli,"
" Matheoli," &c. All proper names were
stumbling-blocks to the writers of despatches
in that era ; whether educated like Louvois,
half-educated like Saint-Mars, or as totally
unlettered as Du Junca.

The age assigned to the prisoner, "forty-
five or thereabouts" instances again the utter
indifference and lack of care with which
these entries were made. Probably, how-
ever, no one in the Bastille, not even Saint-
Mars, knew Mattioli's age. Born in 1640,

THE MASK COMES TO THE BASTILLE. 349

he was sixty-three at the date of his death.
According to Delort, he told the apothecary
of the Bastille that he was sixty ; a close
guess for one who had lost count of time for
near a quarter of a century.

So fades and vanishes that tragic figure.

35°

CHAPTER XI.

If there had been no mask in
the case ? The fascination of the
history has centred there. Had Saint-Mars
not carried his prisoner from the Isles to the
Bastille in that provoking domino, his story,
like enough, had never engaged the curiosity
of the world. Stories as sinister and sad
have oozed from the shades of the Bastille,
of the Conciergerie, of Bicetre, of the
Chatelet — stories which never had audience,
or which have lain for generations among
forgotten things. But the mask has per-
petuated itself; and, so simple as it proves,
it has kept alive, through an infinity of
changes, the memory of the prisoner whom
it hid.

Q. E. D. 35 1

And the mask was really nothing.

From the instrument of torture invented
by Voltaire, it shrinks to the little fashion-
able shield of black velvet which every
Italian gentleman had in his wardrobe ;
which was de rigueur in Carnival time ; and
which both Mattioli and the Duke of
Mantua used as a matter of course in their
private interviews with d'Estrades. In the
Legend, the mask is everything : in the
true, documentary history of the Masked
Man it figures scarcely at all. We know
from Du Junca's Journal that the prisoner
was masked when he entered the Bastille ;
but this is the first official notice on the
subject. No document attests that he wore
the mask at Pignerol or at the Isles.
Saint-Mars does not anywhere allude to it ;
nor is there any injunction about a mask in
any despatch from Versailles. Louis XIV.
never gave the order which has been attri-

352 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

buted to him ; Louvois never gave it ; Bar-
bezieux never gave it. Up to the date of
the entry into the Bastille, the mask seems
to have been not much more than an acci-
dent of the history ; there is only the
statement in the Prudenza trionfante di
Casale that the prisoner was masked by the
persons who arrested him.

We have it from Du Junca that in the
Bastille the prisoner was " masked always."
Without the least straining at the facts
this may be interpreted to mean that he
wore his mask whenever there was occa-
sion for him to be seen. And this the
prisoner may have done of choice ; there
are times and seasons in prison when it
would be a convenience and a relief to
possess this ready means of disguising one-
self.

Pere Griffet, chaplain of the Bastille in
1745, observes in his Methode de Fhistoire:

G. & D. 353

V There is nothing to show that he was
obliged to wear his mask when alone in
his chamber, or in the presence of de
Rosarges or the governor, by whom he
was perfectly well known." If compelled
to wear it at all, " it would only be when
he crossed the courtyard to attend mass,
in order that he might not be recognised
by the sentinels, or when some person on
the staff, not privy to the secret, was sent
into his chamber." On the whole, it might
be conjectured that the mask was an in-
spiration of Saint-Mars when he fetched
his prisoner from the Isles to the Bastille,
and that it was afterwards adopted by the
prisoner himself, who secured thereby the
slight liberty or relief of the incognito.

But, let the origin of its employment
have been what it may, this velvet vizor
was to bear a part not less than astonish-
ing in the fable of the Masked Man.

23

354 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

This was not only natural, but, in a sense,
inevitable. I believe that the Legend
itself had no other genesis than the
mystery of the mask. The sense of
surprise which it produced in Du Junca
was immediately communicated to the
whole staff of the Bastille. Time flowed,
but the mask was still the great memory
and tradition of the fortress. The prisoner
himself—" Marchiel," " Marchioly," Mattioli
— remained unknown : Du Junca's Journal
was not yet laid bare, the St. Paul's
register was a sealed book, the State
documents had not become the nation's
property. But the steady, continuous, and
provocative tradition of the mask lived on
within the walls of the Bastille. There
it was found by the many students,
philosophers, and men of letters who lay
behind those bolts for longer or shorter
terms in the eighteenth century. Voltaire

Q. E- £>. 355

was imprisoned in the Bastille in 17 17,
and again, for a few days (most unjustly),
in 1726. Here, in the very theatre of
the mystery, these inquisitive keen minds
got the earliest inkling of it ; and one
poor shred of fact was even then gather-
ing to itself both surmise and invention.
It is an officer of the Bastille who sees
in imagination the stripping and rehabili-
tating of the prisoner's cell : where, then,
would the flight of a Voltaire end ? : — whose
was the face beneath the mask ? The men
of letters, released from the Bastille, fastened
on this rare enigma ; and those among
them who saw here a means of involving
in new discredit the imperious sovereignty
of Louis XIV., rose gladly to the oppor-
tunity. The mask, and the reason of the
mask : these were the things to account
for. So, unquestionably, did the Legend

begin to be.

23 *

356 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

But now, at last, was Mattioli indeed
the man ? It was objected to Topin, that
the complete silence on this subject of the
copious Saint-Simon (who has peeped into
almost every cupboard in the Court of
Louis XIV.) made an important count
against him. Topin shrewdly saw that
Saint-Simon's silence made, not against,
but for him. " That immortal gossip has
in truth lighted up for us the very holes
and corners of Louis XIV.'s Court. From
its pettiest shifts to its innermost intrigues,
nothing has escaped him ; nothing that had
to do with inner France. But of foreign
affairs he knew only those that concerned
the end of the reign, when they were in
the hands of his friend the Marquis de
Torcy. Earlier than this, he was as igno-
rant of what passed beyond the borders of
France as he was intimate with everything
that passed within them. His silence, then,

Q. E. D. 357

which would be more than strange if it
were possible to trace the Mask to a
family of France, is its own interpreta-
tion if the prisoner were a foreigner,
arrested beyond the French frontier, and
as early as 1679." *

This is distinctly suggestive ; though, as
testimony, it has of course, only a negative
value. We come closer. At whatever point
in the enquiry the mysterious prisoner is
named, there has Mattioli been found ; and
to no other among the prisoners of Saint-
Mars has the term proved applicable. The
political role of Mattioli has been defined,
the circumstances set forth in which he fell
under the vengeance of Louis XIV., and
incurred that terrible punishment — inflicted,
as Maurice Boutry says, " dans si grand
secret." We have the King's order for his
arrest with the particular injunction that no

* Topin.

358 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

one is ever to know what becomes of him ;
we have Catinat's report of the seizure of
Mattioli, so well contrived that even the
officers who assisted him were ignorant of
the prisoner's name ; we have the witness
of the Prudenza trionfante di C as ale, in
which the transaction is described from
the beginning. This was the man whom
Louis XIV. destined to end his life in
prison, and from the hour that he entered
Pignerol he has been observed, followed,
step by step, to the night of his death in the
Bastille.

But this is not all. The proof does not
end here. It is shown in the Journal of
Du Junca that the prisoner whom Saint-Mars
brought masked from the Isles was an ancient
prisoner who had been in his keeping at
Pignerol, the first of Mattioli's three dungeons,
and the one in which he remained when other
prisoners were transferred with Saint- Mars

Q. E. D. 361

to Exiles. Du Junca has made Pignerol
essential in the history of the Mask. We
come now to the axiomatic proof of M. Funck-
Brentano. The reader was asked to bear
in mind the despatch of Louvois to Saint-
Mars (June 9, 1 681) enclosing instructions
for the journey of the two prisoners who were
to be taken from Pignerol to Exiles. The
despatch speaks then of the prisoners who
were left, and their number is precisely
shown, the Sieur du Chamoy having orders to
pay " two crowns a day for the maintenance
of these three prisoners" It is certain then
that there were just five prisoners in Pignerol
on the eve of Saint-Mars's departure for
Exiles, and since we know from Du Junca
that the Mask was an old prisoner of Saint-
Mars at Pignerol, it is among these five that
we must inevitably find him. All the five
are known to us ; their names have happened
in these pages : —

362 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

THE FIVE PRISONERS. THEIR FATE.

Eustache Dauger. A prisoner of so little conse-

quence that he was assigned as a
servant to Fouquet in Pignerol,
while Mattioli, in the same prison,
was still in the strictest seclusion.

La Riviere. Died in December, 1686.

The Jacobin. Died at the close of 1693.

Dubreuil. Died at the Isles, 1697.

Mattioli.

A Euclid could give the result no plainer.
As M. Funck-Brentano observes, with a just
complacency, it is mathematical. There are
five : the first is dismissed on his merits ;
the three that follow are dead before Saint-
Mars sets out for the Bastille — and Mattioli
alone remains. De facto, it was Mattioli
whom Saint-Mars conveyed in the mask from
the Isles of Sainte-Marguerite to the Bastille
in 1698. Mattioli was the hidden prisoner
whom we have kept touch of throughout.

Q. E. D. 3 6 3

There are two very curious corrobora-
tions of the documentary evidence, deriving
their value from the fact that they antedate
by many years the earliest mention of the
name of Mattioli. The last King of France
who appears to have known the history was
Louis XV. Importuned by the Due de
Choiseul to reveal the prisoner's name, the
King would only say that ''all the con-
jectures which had been made hitherto upon
this subject were false." Madame de Pom-
padour was then engaged to press for a
definite reply ; and the King at last informed
her that the prisoner of the mask was the
" Minister of an Italian Prince" *

Still more explicit is Madame Campan, in
the Memoirs of Marie Antoinette. During
the first few months of his reign Louis XVI.

* Dutens : La Correspondance Intercepts. On the other hand, in
the "Memoirs " of Baron de Gleichen, Louis XV. is represented as
refusing to give up the secret. If he knew it, there was no reason
why, at this date, he should not give it up.

364 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

was much occupied, says Madame Campan,
with the revision of his grandfather's papers.
He had promised to share with the Queen
" whatever he might find upon the history
of the Man with the Iron Mask, who, he
thought, had become so inexhaustible a
source of conjecture merely because of the
interest which a celebrated writer had
excited in the detention of a prisoner of
State."

" I was with the Queen," continues Madame
Campan, " when the King, having finished
his researches, told her that he had found
nothing in the secret papers which bore
in any way on the existence of this prisoner ;
that he had referred to M. de Maurepas,
whose age brought him nearer the time
when the affair must have been known
to the ministers, and that M. de Maurepas
had assured him that the prisoner was merely
a person of a very dangerous character by

Q. E. D. 365

reason of his intriguing spirit, and a
subject of the Duke of Mantua. He was
enticed to the frontier, arrested, and kept a
prisoner, first at Pignerol, and then in the
Bastille r *

There, in five lines, Madame Campan has
given us the entire history, and in terms
literally and absolutely correct. She does
not know the name of Mattioli, she is
writing at a time when no one in France
knows it, and when there has not been as yet

* Madame Campan adds: " Such was in fact the real truth about
the man on whom people have been pleased to fix an iron mask. And

thus was it related in writing, and published by M , twenty years

ago. He had searched the depot of foreign affairs, and there he had
found the truth : he had laid it before the public ; but the public
prepossessed in favour of a version which attracted them by the mar-
vellous, would not acknowledge the authenticity of the true account.
Everyone relied upon the authority of Voltaire : and it is still believed
that a natural or a twin brother of Louis XIV. lived a number of years
in prison with a mask over his face. The whimsical story of this mask,
perhaps, had its origin in the old custom, among both men and women
in Italy, of wearing a velvet mask when they exposed themselves to the
sun. It is possible the Italian captive may have shown himself some-
times upon the terrace of his prison with his face thus covered."

366 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

a single word about him in connection with
the mystery of the Mask ; yet the whole
truth is there. It is Duke Charles's envoy :
d'Estrades lures him to the frontier : Catinat
arrests him ; Saint-Mars has him at Pignerol,
at the Isles, and in the Bastille. It is
Mattioli's story in a nutshell. Madame
Campan's sympathy with her subject no-
where betrays her into loose or inaccurate
statements ; and had she been inventing in
this instance it would have been the most
extraordinary example of invention in all
literature. *

With the official documents which bear

* In the essay in the Revue des Etudes Historiques, June-July,
1899, in which he substantiates the proofs of M. Funck-Brentano,
Vicomte Maurice Boutry has produced a confirmatory passage from the
Souvenirs of the Marquise de Crequy. Summing up a discussion on
the Iron Mask between Marshal de Noailles, the Duchess de Luynes,
the Due de Broncas and others, the Marquise adds : " The leading and
best-informed persons of my time always considered that that famous
history had no other foundation than the capture and imprisonment of
the Piedmontese Mattioli. Voltaire's details are the most ridiculous
fable." Interesting, but of most questionable authenticity. Was
there ever a Marquise de Crequy ?

Q. E. D. 367

them out, these pregnant passages make
good the case.

So the task is ended, the burden of the
mystery rolls off : Mattioli the Italian takes
the place of that impossible romantic creature
who has so long usurped it. The historic
truth of the affair is best, though we lose a
Prince who never lived. For a tragi-coloured
myth we exchange a living tragedy ; a tragedy
prolonged above the ordinary miseries of
men. The punishment of Mattioli, through
four - and - twenty years, for a single act
of treachery, the effect of which was
transient, takes something from the splen-
dours of the reign in which it was inflicted.

With his unfailing sense of dramatic con-
trast, Topin has noted that at the very hour
of Mattioli's unheeded death on a pallet in
the Bastille, Charles of Mantua arrived on a
visit to Louis XIV. Did Louis, who lavished
on his guest the riches of the Luxembourg,

368 THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK.

tell him the fate of his ancient favourite ?
It would have been heard by Charles as
carelessly as Louis would have told it.
Scarce a bowshot from the palace, two turn-
keys of the Bastille were trailing Mattioli
in the dusk to a grave in the churchyard of
St. Paul.

CONCLUSION.

By Mr. TIGHE HOPKINS.

In One vol., Crown 8vo. Price Six Shillings.

The Silent Gate:

A Voyage into Prison.

PRESS NOTICES.

" Mr. Tighe Hopkins writes so feelingly and so knowingly of prison
life that we might fancy he had served a term, of penal servitude.
Certainly we have never had it brought home to us so forcibly as in
some of these stories that the ways of transgressors are hard when
they are caught and sentenced. . . . Mr. Hopkins takes a variety
of types for the subjects that illustrate the system, and his stories
alternate between tragedy and comedy. . . . The general effect
is to give an excellent idea of the inner working of prison routine
and the effects of punishment on different temperaments." — Times.

" His great strength lies in this — that, though he has taken a
subject which lends itself to sensational, and even to melodramatic
treatment, he knows how to be effective without being melodramatic
or sensational. His book is a set of eleven short stories, all dealing
with episodes of prison life, and they are done with a pathos that
is never mawkish or conventional, and a humour that is never, or
hardly ever, forced. The story called ' Turkey ' is delightful comedy.
. . . All the stories are written with admirable restraint." —
Literature.

"It is to Mr. Hopkins's credit that in his hands prison life is
interesting in its strangeness and touching in its humanities. He
knows the' routine, the slang, the habits, the tricks, the punish-
ments, the darker shades, and brighter gleams of life in Her Majesty's
prisons. He can gratify the curiosity of the man who rides past
Newgate every morning on his 'bus, or the railway passenger who
sees the turrets and low walls of Wormwood Scrubbs turning and
fading in the dusk. And he can do this without hardness. . . .
It is unnecessary to say that this book is well written. ' An Idler
in Old France ' and ' Lady Bonnie's Experiment ' had qualities of
style which Mr. Hopkins was not likely to lose or carelessly abandon."
— Academy.

ii PRESS OPINIONS— continued*

"A series of sketches of prison life by one who not only knows-
his subject, but can put his knowledge into effective literary shape.
Prison life is of necessity a gruesome thing — but the gruesomenes*
is here diversified with gleams of real humour and pathos." — Saturday
Review.

" Mr. Tighe Hopkins has seldom done anything better than this
volume of prison stories, ' The Silent Gate.' It abounds in curious
detail, it is neither too sentimental nor too cynical, is redeemed
by many flashes of humour and many studies of queer characters.
. . . If 'Benjamin Oudd,' and 'Miss Pocket in B Wing,' and 'Miss
Cullender's Lamb ' are inventions, they are, at all events, very good
inventions. Miss Pocket's flirtation with an invisible male prisoner,
under the incredible difficulties which the rules of Her Majesty's
Prisons place in the way of such proceedings, is a delightful idea.
. . . Mr. Hopkins does not ostensibly write with a purpose, yet
incidentally he brings out the points which a prison reformer
would insist upon." — Westminster Gazette.

'* Mr. Tighe Hopkins has long cultivated an elegant taste in dungeons,
ancient and modern. His tales of old French dungeons are piquant to
the connoisseur of dark walls and rusty fetters. In ' The Silent Gate r
he has collected stories of modern English prison-life, and they repro-
duce the prison atmosphere with such extraordinary fidelity that
if we did not know Mr. Hopkins's career very well, we should be
inclined to ask : ' What was he in for ? And how often ? ' These
stories are all interesting, and some of them are well-nigh perfect both
in matter and treatment." — Illustrated London News-

" If the impression left upon the mind by these stories is of the
sorrow and degradation of prison life, yet they show that through
this atmosphere of gloom break gleams of humour and of sublime
heroism. It would be difficult to go beyond the pathos of ' The Release
of Benjamin Cudd.' The slowly advancing madness of this poor imbecile
is described with the author's accustomed swiftness and pre-
cision of touch, which bring out the pity of the tragedy.
The suddenness and inevitableness of the crisis are finely rendered.
The humour of ' Miss Pocket in B Wing ' is a delightful break in the
pervading sorrow. ... A very striking tale, 'Miss Cullender's
Lamb,' reveals how in the heart of a hardened woman runs a redeem-
ing streak of sublime devotion. This collection of moving and graphic
tales brings home to the imagination more forcibly than any treatise
the perplexities that attend the problem of the treatment of criminals."
— Daily News.

"In the present volume 'The Release of Benjamin Cudd' is Mr.
Hopkins's best study of criminal character. Benjamin, is a real prison

PRESS OPISlOTSS—contintted. Tij

type, and may be found by the dozen inside the walls of Her Majesty's
gaols. . . . Mr. Hopkins is at his best -when describing Benjamins
feelings in expectation of being called before the visiting justices to be
sentenced to the 'cat.' Nothing could be better than the account of
Benjamin's breakdown under punishment, his hallucination, his
delirium, his final intellectual collapse. Benjamin is a fine study in
criminal psychology, eminently true to life. We should like Mr.
Hopkins to give us more work of this kind, and leave ingenious escapes
to lesser literary lights."— Daily Chronicle.

" Although Mr. Hopkins writes pleasantly enough to keep the reek
of the midnight oil from his readers' nostrils, his knowledge of his
subject is always so large and full that he can only have attained
to it by long and patient study. In these respects his last volume
is like those which preceded it, so that ' The Silent Gate ' may
safely be commended to those who wish to get not only some general
impression of prison life, but also to become acquainted with certain
of its sordid details. . . . Mr. Hopkins writes with such con-
vincing certainty as to his facts that the reader will not hesitate
to accept him as an authority." — Pall Mall Gazette.

" Of prison stories there is one all too-familiar type, which tells
of the blameless convict, the corruptible warder, and the heroic escape.
' The Silent Gate' is a refreshing change; a collection of excellently
readable tales of the world inside the ' silent gate', some racy, some
pathetic. Mr. Hopkins introduces us to types that are new. Some
of these the system ruins; others, like the delightful 'Turkey,' are
simply sunny, innocent souls, whom no amount of house-breaking
could contaminate. . . . But Bone and Miss Pocket are the gems
of the book." — St. James's Gazette.

" No writer to-day has an easier narrative style than Mr. Tighe
Hopkins, or a more agreeably urbane gift of humour. In a book
about prison life and prisoners there hardly seems to be much scope
for these accomplishments ; yet in ' The Silent Gate ' Mr. Hopkins
uses both very pleasantly. The story 'Turkey' is a perfect gem of
light liandling and whimsical observation." — Daily Mail.

" In eleven brief and powerful tales in his best style, Mr. Tighe
Hopkins takes his reader on 'a voyage into prison.' The book will
be read with real, if melancholy, interest. Mr. Hopkins has made
a careful study of many of the types of characters to be found within
the walls of the convict prisons of England, and his darkest pictures in
these pages are at once vivid and impressive. . . . The tales are
not all pathetic. There is a fine thread of humour running through
tbem all, imparting to their touching realism a strong artistic quality.
The book will interest a large class of readers." — Scotsman.

iv PRESS OPINIONS— continued.

" Unusual interest attaches to a collection of stories by Mr. Tighe
Hopkins, entitled ' The Silent Gate : A Voyage into Prison.' Quitting
the familiar streets and dungeons of mediaeval France, Mr. Hopkins
takes us boldly into a modern gaol. ... A series of brilliant
sketches of the strange types of humanity that gather within "the prison
walls. Only an expert could pronounce upon the fidelity of such por-
traiture; all that the reader knows is that a vivid picture is pre-
sented to his imagination. . . . These remarkable stories will
certainly startle and arrest." — Manchester Guardian.

" Many stories of prison life have been written, but few that show
so intimate a knowledge as the eleven which together make up ' The
Silent Gate.' ... In each story the crime is but an incident,
a nothing ; the individual is the centre of interest — the study in
psychology. So well are they presented that we have a difficulty
in not believing that the characters are true to life, though ' Miss
Pocket in B Wing ' is too thorough a romance not to have been helped
by fiction. . . . Mr. Hopkins writes with so much quiet humour,
has so delicate a touch upon the sordid side of life, that he makes
even a prison amusing." — Literary World.

" A varied assortment of prison stories, some pathetic, some
humorous; all throbbing with a deep humanity." — Publishers'
Circular.

" It is no small tribute to Mr. Hopkins's powers of vivid delineation
to say that the reading of ' The Silent Gate ' makes one feel quite
'bad.' It is the next best thing to being 'in' in person. The whole
scene comes before you. . . . The strange case of Dr. Ashmole,
the 'last prisoner' in Newgate before its disuse, is of a curiously tragic
character, although quite within the bounds of possibility ; while the
' Singular Conduct of C 53 ' owes its interest, we expect, to the clever
imagination of the author. ... Its humour is not the least attrac-
tive quality of ' The Silent Gate.' " — Bookseller.

" ' The Release of Benjamin Cudd,' ' Turkey,' and ' Miss Cullender's
Lamb' call for special mention." — World-

" Mr. Tighe Hopkins has hit upon a new idea in his ' Silent Gate.'
Nobody, so far as I remember, has written an entire book of prison
stories. Certainly no one has given us such an entirelv fresh incarna-
tion of criminal life as has Mr. Hopkins in his ' Turkey ' — the boy who
will make the fortune of 'The Silent Gate.' ... Its success is a
foregone conclusion." — New York Times.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

AN IDLER IN OLD FRANCE

In i vol. Crown Svo, price 6s.

PRESS NOTICES.

" ' An Idler in Old France ' is not, as its title might be taken to
imply, a book of travel. It is a series of pleasant literary rambles
among the social annals of by-gone France, illustrating such subjects
as the streets of old Paris, their humours and their abominations,
the toilets and meals of its inhabitants, French mediaeval inns, sermons,
apprentices, doctors, and barber-surgeons, the old fashions of la chasse,
and so forth. Mr. Hopkins writes from the fulness of knowledge and
draws his pictures with a vivid touch, and yet not without the dis-
cretion which his subject often demands. Readers who idle with him
will idle well and find plenty of entertainment." — Times-

" ' There are many curious and pleasant paths, not over-trodden
yet in this romantic tract, which might be for another day,' says Mr.
Hopkins in his preface. The phrase seems to predict a second volume
— so much the better : to idle in old France with an observer so
attentive and so vivacious is not to lose one's time." — Saturday
Review.

" We have seldom read a more charming book of its kind. The
author has rambled in the by-ways of old French history, and in a
series of essays, written in a smooth and picturesque style, has drawn A
series of graphic pictures of old French life which will be equally
interesting to the ignorant and the well-informed. They are magazine
articles of a sort that gets rarer and rarer as the spread of education
widens the circle of readers. ... No contemporary writer does
this kind of work better than Mr. Tighe Hopkins." — Literature.

" . . . You perceive the task which Mr. Hopkins sets him-
self. He performs it as thoroughly as he dare, and as delicately as
lie may, and the result is a book of curious interest. . . . Romance
is for ever there, reality here. To contrast them piquantly has always
been accounted amusing, and it is often instructive. Here it is both."
— Academy.

" Everything is told wittily and well, and Mr. Hopkins manages to
throw a graceful veil even over repulsive topics." — Bookseller.

vi PRESS OPINIONS— continued.

" In these jottings by an idler in old France you have uncovered the
hidden darkness of a superficially brilliant epoch. The book is full
of curious documents and strange records, and is unquestionably a
valuable addition to our knowledge of times and peoples." — Bookman.

"... The Middle Ages with the gilt off, the romance taken
away. . . . Mr. Tighe Hopkins's book is full of curious and in-
teresting things." — Spectator.

"If Mr. Tighe Hopkins robs the olden time of much of its halo,
he shows that the new is steadily, if slowly, making for righteousness.
Mr. Hopkins does not do this purposely. He does not preach, does
not draw moral lessons of any kind. From his accumulations of old
French lore he selects the significant facts, and leaves those of his
readers with a turn for reflection to draw their own conclusions. . . .
The book abounds in well-selected information, and is a valuable help
to the understanding of the period of social evolution of which it treats."
— Daily News.

" As ' An Idler in Old France,' Mr. Tighe Hopkins elects to explore
the neglected historical by-ways. He ' idles ' to some purpose when the
result is these entertaining chapters of social history." — Dundee
Advertiser.

"As an appropriate corrective or supplement to the romantic view
of mediaeval life which leaves out of account everything that is not
picturesque, we know of nothing better than Mr. Hopkins's essays
. . . a book which is at once full of information and of entertain-
ment." — Daihf Chronicle-

" Mr. Tighe Hopkins has no rival among present-day writers in his
knowledge of the characteristics of social life in pre-revolutionary
France." — Daily Mail.

"A delightful series of essays illustrating the charms and the draw-
backs of livinsr in a by-gone time." — Critic

" Most of us would be well content to turn ' idlers ' for the nonce,
if the results of our idleness were to be as fruitful in interest and
entertainment as those of Mr. Tighe Hopkins. . . . We are
tempted to give many extracts from his fascinating volume, but space
forbids, and we must conclude, only hoping for the speedy realisation
of the half-promise of the preface to be guided further by the same
author in these pleasant by-paths of history 'another day.'" — St-
James's Budget-

"It is rarely that a volume of historical studies is so interesting." — .
Globe.

PEESS OPINIONS— continued. tii

u In analysing the habits and customs, and extravagance and irre-
sponsibility of French society in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mr.
Hopkins contributes a real chapter to a very grim history. . . .
The toilet, the table, the mediaeval inn, etc., all provide chapters for
this excellent volume. Mr. Austin Dobson has in many a charming
essay given us similar, but more softened, pictures of 18th century
England. In either case, it is real historical work, helping to that
reconstruction of life and society without which history is but dry
bones." — Westminster Gazette.

" A sheaf of picturesque essays. . . . The relations of mediaeval
masters to their apprentices and work-people is a subject that Mr.
Hopkins discusses with scholarly care in an essay which is packed with
quaint information." — Standard.

" Replete with historical and antiquarian interest. A very acceptable
companion volume to his work on the old prisons of Paris. Though
he writes in a style that avoids the remotest suggestion of pedantry,
Mr. Hopkins proves himself no superficial student." — World.

" The author of ' The Dungeons of Old Paris ' gives us here another
collection of interesting details of past French life . . . evidently
a labour of love, and we gather from the preface that if it finds favour
he may give us yet more results of his researches into the past. We
hope it may be so."— Sunday Times-

" One of the most wholly delightful of recent books." — Sunday Sun,
"Our Book of the Week."

" A very interesting and brightly written book." — Literary World.

" A very entertaining volume." — St. James's Gazette.

" The • sheaf of papers ' gathered and bound together by ' An Idler
in Old France ' was worth gleaning. Mr. Tighe Hopkins, however
sombre his subject, always writes with fascinating freshness and vivid-
ness. There is not a dull page in his chronicle of old French ways, and
hardly one in which one may not find some curious, recondite, and
illuminative piece of information." — Scotsman.

" Frank and vivid ; careful, curious, and amusing." — New York
Tribune.

"A unique book. . . . We have given an idea only of the con-
tents of this entertaining volume, which has assembled an immense
mass of facts from a wide range of reading, and arranged them in an
order that affords a well-proportioned picture of France and the
French two or three hundred years ago. The like of it we should
find it hard to name, and we should hardly know where to turn for an
equal amount of diverting information." — Boston Literary World.

h

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